The aim of this contribution is to put the other chapters of this book into a more general perspective. The other chapters show both the extent and accomplishments and also the limitations of research on the late medieval and early modern Baltic region. As is still commonly the case in most peripheries of the so-called ‘heartlands’ of European civilization, in studies of orality and literacy, Latin and the vernacular, or ‘traditional’ versus ‘literary’ or ‘learned’, the differences and peculiarities tend to be stressed to the detriment of continuities and similarities. Often this is due to a perceived lack of sources, which tends to reinforce the impression of the ‘otherness’ of a periphery. Almost always the realization that other European regions started their development towards literate societies earlier, and that they have so many more sources from a relatively early age at their disposal, leads scholars from the peripheries to look up to their colleagues at the centre – and sometimes even to a disparagement of their own regions’ cultural development. One might, however, also look at a ‘periphery’ such as the Baltic area under the (slightly adapted) motto which served as the title for David Lowenthal's book: ‘The Baltic's past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’ Differently, but no less successfully. And the respective weights of orality, tradition, and literacy may have been different in the Baltic, but for centuries, until the Reformation and maybe, as far as some registers of written culture were concerned, until the end of the ancien régime, Baltic societies developed in ways not dissimilar to other peripheries – or, indeed, to societies developing in the centre of Europe.

Research on the region has also stressed the importance of changes brought about by the printed word, and has devoted considerably less attention to changes resulting from the introduction of writing as such. This is understandable, in that the number of medieval manuscripts extant from, for example, Finland, is considerably less than the number of early modern printed books that once must have been kept and used in the country.