Stefano Gulizia (Ca’ Foscari University, Italy)
While printing has always been a hallmark of Lutheran confessional culture, it is only recently that historians have begun to reassess the importance of translations, not only of catechetical-homiletical works, but also of florilegia and other intermediate sources which could be weaponized during the evangelical struggles of the late sixteenth century. Some of them could make the reformer’s writings accessible to anti-Lutheran readers, as well. This paper examines the scribal marginalia that were appended to Luther’s Enchiridion of 1591, printed in a Swedish translation by the “Officina Academica Societatis Jesu” in Vilnius, such as they are now preserved in the copy marked as H: J 402 at the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel. As I will show, the author of these annotations, who is an Aristotelian professor in Helmstedt, active in the second decade of the seventeenth century, emphasizes the original purpose of the Vilnius edition, namely, pointing out contradictions in Luther’s doctrine. By briefly retracing the influence in Vilnius of the Norwegian Jesuit Lars Nielssen (1538-1622), the paper has two main aims. First, it studies the role of a neglected, early imprint of Vilnius in the context of religious and intellectual diasporas, and within the larger history of confessionalization in the Baltic region. Second, it seeks to contribute to an emerging history of Lutheran identities and memory culture – championed, among others, by Ulinka Rublack – which is pivoted on how religious ideas are sustained by intense, physical practices like, in this case, note-taking and book collecting.