Francis Young’s New Book on Pagans in the Early Modern Baltic Awarded Book Publication Subvention

Francis was born in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk and studied Philosophy at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge and Classics at University of Wales, Lampeter before receiving his doctorate in History from Cambridge University. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and was Volumes Editor for the Catholic Record Society between 2015 and 2017. He spent several years as Head of Sixth Form at an English cathedral school, teaches for Oxford University’s Department for Continuing Education, and regularly appears on BBC radio and other media. Two of his books have previously been shortlisted for the Katharine Briggs Folklore Award.

Woodcut showing Lithuanian pagans worshipping trees, snakes and fire, from Olaus Magnus, On the Northern Peoples (The History Collection / Alamy Stock Photo).

This book provides the first English translations of the key early modern Latin texts on Baltic paganism, including extracts from works by Enea Silvio Piccolomini, Jan Długosz, Filippo Buonaccorsi, Maciej z Miechowa, Johannes Stüler, Martynas Mažvydas, Michalo Lituanus, and Alessandro Guagnini, as well as the complete text of Jan and Hieronim Malecki’s ‘Little book on the sacrifices and idolatry of the Old Prussians’ and Jan Łasicki’s ‘On the gods of the Samogitians’. It is the first book to consider early modern ethnographic works on East-Central Europe in the context of recent scholarship on early modern ethnography as a whole. While the author is an established scholar of the history of religion and belief in medieval and early modern Europe, this will be his first published contribution to the field of Baltic studies.