Von Coimbra nach Tobol’sk

Summary

Worldwide missionary activities from the 16th century onward were not limited to the New World and overseas in general, but also in East Central Europe in the wake of sectarian struggles following the Reformation. Soon after the Tridentine Council (1545–1563), the Jesuits spread their activities to all countries between the Baltic and Adriatic Seas. Not only Catholic but also Lutheran and Calvinist missionaries went to Poland-Lithuania, Hungary, Slovenia, and other countries. The first Polish grammar (Statorius 1568) was published principally for the Calvinist mission in Poland, while the first Slovenian grammar was printed in Wittenberg (Bochorizh 1584) for the use of Lutheran missionaries in the predominantly Catholic Slovenia. This article examines the missionary background and the vernacular character of two further missionary grammars of the Slavic languages. The first Croatian grammar by Bartul Kašić (1575–1650) was printed in Rome for the use of Catholic Jesuit missionaries from Italy working in Illyricum (Kašić 1604). Kašić’s choice of the što-dialect to be the literary norm in missionary publications substantially determined the further standardization history of the Croatian language. Almost a hundred years later H. W. Ludolf (1696) succeeded in printing the first Russian grammar for the Lutheran-Pietistic mission in Muscovy, a milestone on the way to the “refinement” of the Russian vernacular intended by Ludolf to make it the literary language of the Russian Empire. The first grammars of the Slavic vernacular languages can, therefore, be rightly called missionary grammars. This designation also applies to the first grammars of the non-Slavic languages in the Baltic States and Hungary (and, beyond Europe, in the largely Eastern Orthodox Armenia and Ethiopia). Whatever their sect, the authors of these missionary grammars were motivated by rivalry with other Christian denominations in Slavic and non-Slavic speaking countries of the Christian East.