Forgetting Lutheranism: Historians and the Early Reformation in Poland (1517–1548)

Abstract

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.

High clergy and printers: anti-Reformation polemic in the kingdom of Poland, 1520-36

“…Here, the course of the early Reformation in Jagiellonian Poland (a subject little‐known in English‐language scholarship) will be briefly sketched out, before we trace the evolution of local polemic and its genres, and see where these books fit with what we already know about anti‐Reformation printing in Europe in the fifteen‐twenties and thirties. We will then ask what functions anti‐heretical printed books performed in Jagiellonian Poland, arguing that these were multiple and multi‐layered, and went far beyond the single purpose of advancing anti‐Lutheran religious arguments. At the end, we will ask what these books can tell us about the relationship, in this kingdom, between the Latin church and the printing press in the early decades of the Reformation.…”

„Universitas haec catholica”

“…Teolodzy stanowili też główną część składu komisji badającej poglądy Jakuba z Iłży na potrzeby procesu w latach 1534-1535 r. Powoływani też byli jako eksperci w różnych sprawach sądowych prowadzonych przez konsystorz. Jednocześnie prawdą jest, że nie wzięli czynnego udziału w publicznej drukowanej polemice antyprotestanckiej pierwszej fazy reformacji, choć udzielali się studenci uczelni, a z grona profesorów -prawnik Grzegorz Snopek z Szamotuł (Czapska, 1928;Nowakowska, 2012;Nowakowska, 2018;Ptaszyński, 2019).…”