ABSTRACT
The conclusions to the author’s recent book Kith, Kin, and Neighbors: Communities and Confessions in Early Modern Wilno raised—and provisionally attempted to suggest answers to—the question posed implicitly throughout the book: to what extent was Wilno (Vilnius) a unique case, or to what extent can we find similar patterns in other confessionally mixed early modern European cities? Here a broader assessment is offered of what was at stake when two or more ethnic, confessional and religious communities were brought together in one town or city. What range of strategies do we find for encouraging, facilitating and/or imposing the practice of an everyday (sometimes grudging) toleration? What are the shapes a larger comparative study might take, and what research problems would such a project have to face?
