Charms and superstitions of pagan Lithuanians

Lithuania remained pagan until the late Middle Ages and, as such, was an object of curiosity as well as hostility for Christian Europe. Paganism, wrote thirteenth-century Franciscan scholar Bartholomew the Englishman, was "ritus mirabilis". Christian scholars who described pagan rituals did not shy away from negative stereotyping, although sometimes their writings give neutral, almost ethnographic descriptions.

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