CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2022
| Author | Dikavicius, Povilas |
|---|---|
| Title | Honor among Nobles in the 16th century Grand Duchy of Lithuania |
| Summary | The present thesis engages with the concept of honor as a measure of human worth. In contrast to the modern Western ideals, where universal human worth is a cornerstone of politics, throughout most of history human worth was subject to change. It could have been elevated by garnering resources or power, diminished through insults, or revoked for grave crimes, which, in extreme examples, could have entailed deprivation of status as a human being. The ideas governing preconditions for claiming, increasing, or losing human worth were subject to change. The state manipulated human worth to facilitate loyalty and regulate social relations by inflicting shame and threatening humiliation. Insults in honor societies grow in importance and due to fundamentally unstable foundations of human worth damaging words and actions are more prone to provoke a violent reaction as means to assert and defend honor. Here the law provided an alternative path to resolve such conflict, namely, litigation and remuneration practices that ought to substitute blood vengeance with monetary and physical punishments. The polysemy of honor makes it a challenging subject to study. However, informed by analysis of primary sources and a selection of interdisciplinary works on honor, the present study models a specific set of etic concepts subsumed under the word honor in the present context. Honor in this study is taken to have fourfold meaning: status, reputation, honor code, and sense of honor. Status was the legally outlined place occupied within the social hierarchy and is held to be horizontal honor, whereas reputation builds upon status and was expressed through rank and “good name,” therefore is held to be vertical honor. Increase or decrease in reputation held the potential to alter status. The honor code is the set of rules that outlined the expected behavior based on inborn status and facilitated acquiescence with the communal norms through manipulation of reputation. The sense of honor stands for the internalized human worth based on the aspects of honor and is akin to self-worth. The historical context within which the study of honor is undertaken is the 16th century Grand Duchy of Lithuania, particularly focusing on the nobility as a legal corporation within its setting. Considered in hindsight, it was a time of intense modernization within the polity, marked by economic innovations altering the boundaries of hierarchical society, movements for increase of political rights, and extensive legal codification. Behind these processes that altered the architecture of society and state were changes in the social and political thought showing significant influence of Renaissance thinkers. Therefore, the study begins with an examination of political writings that concerned honor as human worth, which had shown that the number of people who could claim honorable status was growing. Many of the scholars employed to write the said treatises were directly involved with codification of the law which shaped social relations among Grand Duchy’s population. Legal analysis showed that honor as status became an instrument in statecraft, whereas honor as reputation functioned as guarantee of trust within local communities. Aiming to thwart arbitrary violence Lithuanian Statutes extended protection to honor as status and reputation. The enaction of these laws is explored based on the archive of the royal court records in 1529-1566. The cases inform of the acts that had been considered insulting or shameful and in doing so informs of the certain tenets of nobles’ honor code and motivations to litigate, which included protection of sense of honor. Lastly, a short discussion of gendered legal aspects of honor and legal practice of commoners reveals that honor was a social structure governing the attribution of human worth within the whole contemporary society. |
| Supervisor | Riedl, Matthias |
| Department | History PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2022/dikavicius_povilas.pdf |
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