Scholarship on anti-Reformation printed polemic has long neglected east-central Europe. This article considers the corpus of early anti-Reformation works produced in the Polish monarchy (1517-36), a kingdom with its own vocal pro-Luther communities, and with reformed states on its borders. It places these works in their European context and, using Jagiellonian Poland as a case study, traces the evolution of local polemic, stresses the multiple functions of these texts, and argues that they represent a transitional moment in the Polish church's longstanding relationship with the local printed book market.
The history of dynasties per se -'the timeless topoi of dynastic power' -is today intensively studied by historians. 1 Yet the history of 'dynasty' as a word or concept has not received significant attention, in spite of the word's ubiquity across many fields and its enduring resonance in wider culture. 2 This article suggests that the story of 'dynasty' the word or idea might significantly complicate our study of 'dynasty' the topic. It argues that the term 'dynasty' is in fact surprisingly etymologically unstable, both in the past and the present, rendering it a problematic term for historians. This ancient word's meaning in historical (and wider) discourse has changed fundamentally in the past 250 years, and in the process also diversified, acquiring multiple, alternative, potentially incompatible uses. The long-term change in the word's meaning exposes historians to the risk of serious anachronism, of misreading our pre-modern sources. The modern plurality of meanings, meanwhile, carries the risk that our own language as scholars is inconsistent, imprecise and unsteady, and that meaning is gradually leaking out of this familiar super-word altogether.This article will explore the problem of the word 'dynasty' in four steps: etymology, historiography, Jagiellonians, and implications. We will first trace the word's etymology from Aristotle, using both historical dictionaries and bibliographical data from seven historic libraries: its peaceable existence in the medieval and early modern periods, through the ferment of the nineteenth century, up to the present. The modern (post 1950s) historiography on dynasties in early modern Europe (c.1450-1700) will then be used as a case-study, to show how in this one field the word confusion over 'dynasty' (between historians and their sources, and amongst historians themselves) has created potential structural cracks in some of the major characterisations, or analytical models, of the period. In light of this, the key findings of a collaborative project on Europe's Jagiellonian dynasty (c.1386-1572) are here set out for the first time, as one example of how we might seek to navigate the linguistic pitfalls present in studying a major ruling lineage of the late medieval and early modern period. Finally, we consider the implications of this discussion for writing the history of times and places well beyond Renaissance Europe, not least in light of the global turn. C.S.L. Davies, in a series of celebrated articles on the Tudors, in which he discovered that sixteenth-century English monarchs did not go by that name, complained bitterly that the word 'Tudor' 'saturates modern writing on the period', 'warps our understanding', having 'acquired a spurious sense of glamour or magnificence'. 3 We might ask whether the same can be said of 'dynasty' itself, a word which Davies noted in passing was also absent in his sources but which, nonetheless, successfully managed to escaped his ire. 4 'Dynasty' has a thorny etymological history. 'Dynastia', when encountered in a sixteenth-c...
This article reconstructs and explores the problematic historiography of the early Reformation in the lands of the Polish Crown, a significant locus of Lutheranism in the reign of King Zygmunt I Jagiellon (1506–1548). The eighteenth, nineteenth, and early-to mid twentieth centuries produced a sizeable literature on early Lutheranism in Poland, fuelled by Polish-German conflict, minority politics, and Stalinist state sponsorship. Since the 1960s, however, scholarship in Polish and German has had very little to say about Lutheranism in the lands of the Polish Crown before 1548. It is argued that the discrediting of Ostforschung after World War Two, coupled with the rise of a new Polish nationalist reading of the Reformation from the 1960s (which rejected Lutheranism as German, and un-Polish), have led to a deliberate twentieth-century “forgetting” of the Polish kingdom’s Lutheran past, which impoverishes our understandings of the European Reformations.
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