The “Great Vilnius Controversy” in Data

This article presents the first systematic reconstruction and quantitative exploration of the confessional polemics produced in Vilnius, Lithuania, between 1574 and 1647 by Catholic (primarily Jesuit), Reformed, and Unitarian authors. Earlier studies have tended to isolate prominent polemicists or individual exchanges, whereas we seek to treat the surviving texts as a single interconnected corpus. At the project’s core is a database of 156 works—first editions, reprints, translations, and manuscript copies—described across forty-five metadata categories. These combine standard bibliographic information with records of cited authorities, polemical themes, discussed topics, and references to local outbreaks of religious violence. The corpus is modeled as a directed graph that links texts, persons, and places. Applying network analysis (reciprocity, density, betweenness) makes it possible to trace how individual exchanges developed, how certain authors held together otherwise separate debates, and how the intensity of controversy rose and then declined. This perspective also reveals larger tendencies: confessional participation proved uneven, and polemical genres gradually shifted as Protestant publishing declined and Catholic authors turned to new rhetorical forms. The article first outlines the historical setting of the Vilnius Controversy and the criteria used to identify and structure the sources. It then explains the database design and a Resource Description Framework ( RDF ) graph. By combining systematic digital analysis with historical interpretation, the study aims to clarify how polemical debates took shape, evolved, and eventually lost momentum in early modern Vilnius

Confessional · Epigraphy · Metadata · Perspective (graphical) · Protestantism · Publishing · Rhetorical question · TRACE (psycholinguistics) · Early Modern Women Writers · Historical Studies of British Isles · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity