| Abstract [eng] |
The printing house of the Vilnius Basilian monastery stands out as one of the oldest and largest printing houses of the Eastern Rite Catholic Church and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the activities of which lasted about 200 years. In this printing house, books were printed in the Polish, Latin, ecclesiastical Slavonic, Lithuanian and Latvian languages. Furthermore, among the books printed by the Basilians were the pieces printed in Italian, French, Greek and English. Following the abolition of the Eastern Rite Catholic Church in 1839, printing operations were not resumed. Instead, all printing equipment was sold out to the printers Teofilius Gluksberg and Abrahami Dworzec as well as to the townsman Gronim Pupkin. The article is the first attempt ever to analyse the organizational aspects of activities in the said printing house such as its localization and premises, legal situation, managers and employees, technical equipment and sales of the printed material. Research of material conditions makes it easier to establish the factors that have contributed to the development and decline of printing activities as well as identify the causes of multilingual multi-denominational printing output in this institutional enterprise. Such research is aimed to better understand the Lithuanian printing business up to the 19th century and provide background information for more comprehensive research in the fields of reading culture, the history of the Basilian order, social history and material culture of Vilnius.... |
