DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.15382560
title: The Great Vilnius Controversy: Database of Catholic–Protestant Polemical Literature from Early Modern Vilnius, Lithuania (1574–1647)

description: General Description

This database accompanies the research project The “Great Vilnius Controversy”: Jesuit–Calvinist Polemical Literature of Early Modern Vilnius (1574–1647) Within Its Domestic and European Contexts financed by the Polish National Science Centre (NCN, Preludium, no. 2023/49/N/HS2/00174). The data were identified and cataloged by Michał E. Nowakowski. The database structure and normalization protocol were developed collaboratively by Michał E. Nowakowski and Cezary Rosiński. The RDF representation was created by Cezary Rosiński, and the interactive HTML graph application was created by Michał E. Nowakowski in consultation with Cezary Rosiński.

The dataset provides the first structured corpus of polemical literature produced in early modern Vilnius, designed to support both historical analysis and digital research in Reformation studies.

The dataset comprises 156 polemical works, including 114 first editions and 22 reprints, 5 extensions, 10 translations, and 11 manuscript copies. The texts were authored predominantly by Catholic (mostly Jesuit) and Reformed writers, with a small number of Unitarian contributions. No Lutheran works were identified. Each record has been assigned a unique identifier (e.g., W1594ACa = W[ork] + [Year of Publication] + [Author’s Initials] + [Letter Distinguisher if Necessary]) and described using 35 standardized metadata fields. These include bibliographic information (author, title, place and date of publication, publisher, format, document type, language), confessional affiliations (authorial and targeted), genre classification, presence of prefaces or dedications, and information on digitized or physical copies.

In addition to these core fields, the dataset incorporates several layers of analytical metadata. Each text is indexed for:(1) Cited authors,(2) Historical figures mentioned,(3) Topics discussed,(4) Mentioned religious tumults or other episodes of violence,(5) Identified polemical targets (works or authors responded to),(6) More than 830 rhetorical tropes and polemical themes, each assigned to one or more of seventeen overarching thematic categories.

All metadata were manually curated and normalized. Personal names have been standardized across the dataset and supplemented with linked Wikidata persistent identifiers where available. Geographical data are annotated with GeoNames URIs for interoperability and future integration into mapping or network analysis tools. For every work, the author(s) name, place and date of publication, and confessional profile of both author and target has been established based on textual evidence and contextual data.

Scope and Inclusion Criteria

The dataset includes works that meet at least one of the following criteria:(1) first published in Vilnius between 1574 and 1647; or(2) authored by individuals active in Vilnius at the time of writing; or(3) responding explicitly to texts that meet condition (1) or (2).

Revised editions issued after an author had relocated elsewhere—such as those of Przydatek (Appendix) to Żywoty świętych (Life of saints) by Piotr Skarga (first published in Vilnius in 1579, cf. W1579PS)—were excluded to preserve the integrity of the local context.

To ensure conceptual coherence, only works in which religious polemic constitutes at least one of central themes were included. This excludes occasional references to doctrinal issues in otherwise non-polemical works (e.g. in broadly devotional texts). Each text has an identifiable authorial or at least adversarial confessional profile, determined through internal content or contextual evidence.

Source Identification Process

The works were identified through a combination of:

(1) Archival research at the Vilnius University Library and the Wroblewski Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences;

(2) Five Lithuanian printed bibliographies:



Ivaškevičius, Adolfas, Juozas Marcinkevičius, and Konstancija Čepienė, eds. 1979. Vilniaus akademijos spaustuvės leidiniai, 1576–1805. Vilnius: Lietuvos TSR Mokslų Akademijos Centrinė biblioteka.

Ivanovič, Marija, ed. 1998. XVII a. Lietuvos lenkiškos knygos: Kontrolinis sąrašas. Vilnius: Vilnius: Lietuvos Nacionalinė Martyno Mažvydo biblioteka.

Narbutienė, Daiva, and Sigitas Narbutas, eds. 1998. XVII a. Lietuvos lotyniškų knygų sąrašas = Index librorum Latinorum Lituaniae saeculi septimi decimi. Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas.

Narbutienė, Daiva, and Sigitas Narbutas, eds. 2002. XV–XVI a. Lietuvos lotyniškų knygų sąrašas = Index librorum Latinorum Lituaniae saeculi quinti decimi et sexti decimi. Vilnius: Lietuvių literaturos ir tautosakos institutas

Dapkievicz, Jolanta, ed. 2020. XVI a. Lietuvos knygos lenkų kalba. Vilnius: Lietuvos nacionalinė Martyno Mažvydo biblioteca.


(3) Manual searches for relevant entries (with the keywords Vilnius / Vilnae / Wilno / Wilnie / Vilna) and annual filters in Polish digital catalogs and bibliographies (NUKAT, KaRo, Estreicher).

Analytical Value

The dataset enables qualitative and quantitative analysis of early modern confessional polemics. It has been used to reconstruct the shifting genre profile of polemical production in Vilnius (from academic treatises to vernacular and satirical forms), patterns of citation and authority, rhetorical strategies, and changing confessional dynamics. It reveals, among other trends:(1) Predominance of Catholic over Protestant output (105 Catholic, 45 Reformed, 5 Unitarian texts);(2) Disappearance of Reformed printing in Vilnius after the 1610s;(3) Increasing vernacularization from the 1580s onward;(4) Emergence of satirical polemic targeting broader, non-academic audiences;(5) Distinctive uses of early modern authorities across confessional lines;(6) Divergence in doctrinal focus and rhetorical strategies between Catholic and Reformed writers.

RDF/Turtle Representation

The_Great_Vilnius_Controversy_RDF.ttl file provides a Linked Data representation of the corpus for integration and query-based reuse. The file contains 40,213 triples. Core classes follow Schema.org—Person (1,523), Place (1,139), Text (156), and Event (28)—with geospatial data from WGS84 (lat and long on 1,121 places, typed as xsd:float), bibliographic qualifiers from FaBiO (hasPageCount, hasFormat, hasPlaceOfPublication), and DCMI Terms for publisher. Entities are identified by stable project URIs in the https://example.org/jesuit_calvinist/ namespace and reconciled to external authorities through 2,458 owl:sameAs links to Wikidata. Dates of publication cover 1574–1647 on Text; person life dates use xsd:gYear; place nodes carry names and, where available, coordinates; events record name, location, start and end dates, and an additionalType label.

The project namespace supplies domain properties that mirror the tabular fields and support network analysis. Text nodes assert confessionalProfile, targetedConfession, documentType, editionType, inLanguage, and genre, and they link to persons and works via responseToAuthor (95), responseToWork (82), keyAuthorsCited (6,302), and keyHistoricalFiguresMentioned (1,843). Topical indexing appears as discussedIssue (2,194), polemicalTheme (6,637), and categorizedPolemicalTheme statements; episodes of violence are recorded with tumultMentioned (72). Authorial confessional profiles in the graph total Roman Catholic 105, Reformed Evangelical 45, Unitarian or Anabaptist 5, and one general Protestant designation. Page counts are preserved as literal strings, and places of publication use FaBiO links to Place nodes. The graph aligns one-to-one with the CSV and XLSX registries, enabling SPARQL queries that reproduce the same counts and filters used by the HTML graph application.

Interactive HTML Graph Application

The_Great_Vilnius_Controversy_Graph_App.html is the interactive network visualization derived from the “Great Vilnius Controversy” database. It is implemented in JavaScript with Graphology for network handling and Sigma.js for display. The graph encodes the polemical corpus as a directed network: texts, authors, cited authorities, historical figures, thematic tags, and doctrinal issues become nodes; their relationships (citations, responses, topical links) form edges. The application loads a curated subgraph with 2,547 nodes and 11,625 edges, representing all 113 original editions but intentionally excluding reprints, translations, and manuscript copies to avoid inflating counts. Each node carries the same standardized metadata used in the CSV/XLSX and RDF datasets, including confessional profile, genre, language, date, and thematic categories.

The interface provides domain-focused analysis tools. Users can restrict the network chronologically (1574–1647), filter texts by confession, and toggle visibility of different node families (texts, persons, cited authors, historical figures, themes, issues). Additional controls allow filtering by genre and language, so the graph can be limited to, for example, Latin treatises or Polish satirical verse. Search retrieves specific items; ego-network expansion shows up to four-step neighborhoods; and a shortest-path function reveals how nodes connect across the polemical field. Node size and color can be reassigned live according to degree, PageRank, betweenness, or eigenvector centrality, and community detection is built in: the default Louvain partition is adjusted so no community mixes more than two confessions, but users may recompute their own clusters. All quantitative measures (density, reciprocity, path length) correspond directly to the data. The tool is intended to let scholars trace polemical exchange, citation patterns, thematic concentrations, and linguistic and generic shifts dynamically and to reproduce or extend the network analysis discussed in the project.

What Changed in Version 2



RDF/Turtle graph added for linked-data interoperability and query-based reuse.

Interactive HTML application added for exploratory network analysis with export functions.

XLSX structure extended with sheets People, Places, and Events, alongside already uploaded Texts.

CSV packaging provided per each entity (Texts, People, Places, Events).

Field-label alignment in Texts: the field “Tumults and  Mentioned” is corrected to “Tumults Mentioned.”

Work-ID de-duplication: a duplicate WorkID in v1 (W1586MVa) that covered two distinct works by Manuel de Vega is resolved in v2 by assigning W1586MVc to Assertiones theologicae; all 156 works now carry unique Work IDs.

Edition-type clarification: for two 1647 satirical epigram collections—W1647JCa and W1647JCb—the Edition Type is encoded as a dual value (“Manuscript Copy; Original”). This preserves the manuscript-witness status while allowing these works surviving only in manuscripts to be counted with “original” outputs in aggregate analyses of satirical production, including the HTML Graph Application. In the case of the Kolęda paniom saskim, W1647JCa is the only surviving witness. For the Kalwińska z Chrystusem wojna, W1647JCb was selected because it preserves the most complete set of epigrams belonging to this cycle.

Texts schema expanded with persistent identifiers to support clean joins to registries: Author ID, Additional Authors ID, Place ID, Dedicated to ID, Response to Author ID, Key Authors Cited ID, and Key Historical Figures Mentioned ID. IDs use project-wide conventions (People = P####, Places = PL####, Events = E##). Multi-value cells remain semicolon-separated.


Data Format

The database has been published in two formats: CSV to ensure greater compliance with FAIR Principles and XLSX to address the specificities and needs of the social sciences and humanities research community. An RDF/Turtle file (.ttl) encodes the data as triples for linked-data use. An HTML file (.html) is a single self-contained web page embedding the network graph in JSON for offline exploration.

Files



The_Great_Vilnius_Controversy_Database.xlsx — integrated workbook with sheets Texts, People, Places, Events.

The_Great_Vilnius_Controversy_Database_Texts.csv — text-level table; UTF-8; semicolon delimiter.

The_Great_Vilnius_Controversy_Database_People.csv — person registry; UTF-8; semicolon delimiter.

The_Great_Vilnius_Controversy_Database_Places.csv — place registry; UTF-8; semicolon delimiter.

The_Great_Vilnius_Controversy_Database_Events.csv — events table; UTF-8; semicolon delimiter.

The_Great_Vilnius_Controversy_RDF.ttl — RDF graph of works, people, places, and events with intertextual and event links.

The_Great_Vilnius_Controversy_Graph_App.html — standalone interactive graph application.


Licensing and Access

The dataset is published under the [Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)] license and adheres to the FAIR data principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable). Data are freely available for scholarly reuse with attribution.