High Clergy and Printers: Antireformation Polemic in The

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High clergy and printers: anti-Reformation polemic in the kingdom of Poland, 1520–36 Natalia Nowakowska University of Oxford

Abstract 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.

Since the nineteen-seventies, a sizeable literature has accumulated on anti-Reformation printing – on the small army of men, largely clerics, who from c.1518 picked up their pens to write against Martin Luther and his followers, and whose literary endeavours passed through the printing presses of sixteenth-century Europe. In its early stages, much of this scholarship set itself the task of simply mapping out or quantifying the old church’s anti-heretical printing activity. Pierre Deyon (1981) and David Birch (1983), for example, surveyed the rich variety of anti-Reformation polemical materials published during the French Wars of Religion and in Henry VIII’s England respectively.1 John Dolan offered a panoramic sketch of international anti-Lutheran writing in an important essay published in 1980, while Wilbirgis Klaiber’s landmark 1978 database identiﬁed 3,456 works by ‘Catholic controversialists’ printed across Europe before 1600.2 This body of work triggered a long-running debate about how we should best characterize the level of anti-Reformation printing in the sixteenth century. Using Klaiber’s data, in two major publications (1988, 1994) Mark U. Edwards stressed the relative paucity of anti-Reformation texts produced in German-speaking lands as a whole, and the extent to which they were dwarfed by the ﬂood of pro-reformer

1 P. Deyon, ‘Sur certaines formes de la propagande religieuse au XVIe siècle’, Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations, xxxvi (1981), 16–25; D. Birch, Early English Reformation Polemics (Salzburg, 1983). 2 J. P. Dolan, ‘The Catholic literary opponents of Luther and the Reformation’, in Reformation and Counter Reformation, ed. E. Iserloh, J. Glazik and H. Jedin, trans. A. Biggs and P.W. Becker (History of the Church, v, 1980), pp. 191–207; W. Klaiber, Katholische Kontroverstheologen und Reformer des 16. Jahrhunderts: ein Werkverzeichnis (Münster, 1978). For a more recent attempt to index anti-Reformation printing, see A. Laube and U. Weiss, Flugschriften gegen die Reformation (1518–24) (Berlin, 1997). The 1980s also saw the appearance of monographic studies of leading anti-Lutheran authors (E. Iserloh, Johannes Eck (1486–1543): Scholastiker, Humanist, Kontroverstheologe (Münster, 1981); H. Smolinsky, Augustin von Alveldt und Hieronymus Emser: eine Untersuchung zur Kontroverstheologie der frühen Reformationszeit im Herzogtum Sachsen (Münster, 1983); and more recently, see M. Samuel-Scheyder, Johannes Cochlaeus aus Wendelstein: ein Humanistenleben in der Herausforderung seiner Zeit (Heimbach, 2009)).

Copyright © 2013 Institute of Historical Research DOI: 10.1111/1468-2281.12037 Historical Research, vol. 87, no. 235 (February 2014) Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. 44 Anti-Reformation polemic in the kingdom of Poland, 1520–36 writings, often at a rate of 1:5.3 Edwards suggested that this was the result of institutional and cultural obstacles to ‘Catholic controversialist’ printing, such as a lack of patronage for polemicists, and anxieties about debating openly with heretics.4 Using an alternative dataset, however, Richard Crofts (1985) offered a different reading, concluding that in Germany ‘after 1525, the number of Catholic publications was surprisingly high, nearly matching the total of the reformers’.5 In a major subsequent intervention in 2004, Andrew Pettegree and Matthew Hall used the Index Aureliensis catalogue of sixteenth-century books to argue forcefully that the early modern European book-market consisted of a series of distinct local markets and industries, which should not necessarily be judged against (and especially not judged as deﬁcient against) a German ‘norm’. Pettegree and Hall held up the example of France, where, with the brief exception of the ﬁfteen-sixties, Catholic printing ‘at least matched’ the number of Reformation works produced in the kingdom in the sixteenth century.6 German historians such as Frank Aurich and ChristophVolkmar have, meanwhile, shed new light on the epicentres of anti-Reformation printing in the Holy Roman Empire, Leipzig and Dresden, under the patronage of Duke Georg of Saxony (1500–39).7 Recent research has therefore moved away from generalizations about the overall level of commitment to anti-Reformation printing by the old church, and come to emphasize regional context and variation instead. At the same time, a parallel strand of scholarship has concerned itself with the actual methods and lines of attack adopted in anti-Reformation polemic, both literary and theological. Jürgen Schulte’s 1973 monograph on Thomas Murner’s celebrated German-language satire Grossem Lutherischen Narren (1522) was an early and ambitious example of this approach – a book which explored the psychological dimensions of Murner’s work, reconstructed his audience and deconstructed his rhetorical techniques, while insisting that printed polemics must be read in light of their social function.8 The actual meat of the theological arguments developed and deployed against Luther has been most fully mapped out in a 1991 monograph by David Bagchi, which meticulously reconstructed how printed polemic shaped religious battle lines to

3 M. U. Edwards, Jr.,‘Catholic controversial literature, 1518–55: some statistics’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, lxxix (1988), 189–205; M. U. Edwards, Jr., Printing, Propaganda and Martin Luther (Berkeley, Calif., 1994), p. 29. 4 Edwards, ‘Catholic controversial literature’, pp. 200–2 and Printing, Propaganda,pp.57–82. Underlying difﬁculties faced by anti-Reformation writers were earlier also explored by P. Polman, ‘La méthode polémique des premiers adversaires de la Réforme’, in P. Polman, Adversaria Pontiani: verspreide geschriften van Pontianus Polman (Amsterdam, 1976), pp. 1–14 (essay originally published 1929). 5 R. A. Crofts, ‘Printing, reform, and the Catholic Reformation in Germany (1521–45)’, Sixteenth Century Jour., xvi (1985), 369–81,atp.381. Crofts worked from the British Library Museum’s Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in the German-speaking Countries and German Books Printed in other Countries, from 1455 to 1600 now in the British Museum, ed. A. F. Johnson and V. Scholderer (1962). 6 A. Pettegree and M. Hall, ‘The Reformation and the book: a reconsideration’, Historical Jour., xlvii (2004), 785–808,atp.802. 7 C. Volkmar, ‘Turning Luther’s weapons against him: the birth of Catholic propaganda in Saxony in the 1520s’, in The Book Triumphant: Print in Transition in the 16th and 17th Centuries, ed. M. Walsby and G. Kemp (Leiden, 2011), pp. 115–31, and his fuller treatment in Reform statt Reformation: die Kirchenpolitik Herzog Georgs von Sachsen (Tübingen, 2008); F. Aurich,‘Die Emserpresse im Dienst der Religionspolitik Herzog Georgs’, in Bücher, Drucker, Bibliotheken in Mitteldeutschland, ed. E. Bünz (Leipzig, 2006), pp. 153–63 and Die Anfänge des Buchdrucks in Dresden: die Emserpresse 1524–6 (Dresden, 2000). 8 J. Schutte, ‘Schympff red’: Frühformen bürgerlicher Agitation in Thomas Murners ‘Grossem Lutherischen Narren’ (1522) (Stuttgart, 1973). See also Barbara Könneker’s treatment of the polemical work of Johannes Eck and Thomas Murner in Die deutsche Literatur der Reformationszeit: Kommentar zu einer Epoche (Munich, 1975), pp. 84–90, 116–24.

1525, while offering wider observations on polemical genres and their authors.9 More recently, Luc Racaut has examined how Catholic polemicists in the French Wars of Religion constructed an image of the Protestant other, in verbally violent ways which legitimized physical violence (2002), while Douglas Trevor has explored Thomas More’s literary construction of the polemical author in the Responsio ad Lutherum (2001).10 As this survey suggests, scholarship on anti-Reformation polemic has to date engaged almost exclusively with the Holy Roman Empire and what we now call western Europe, passing over the more easterly kingdoms and principalities of Latin Christendom.11 To help redress this problematic imbalance, this article aims to introduce to the debate anti-Reformation polemics produced in the kingdom of Poland between 1520 and 1536 – a corpus of thirteen (known) Latin books and pamphlets composed by nine senior clergy. Even within Polish historiography, this body of early anti-Luther polemic has received only limited and fragmentary consideration. Julian Bukowski, for example, offered a two-page sketch of Polish anti-Lutheran polemic in his seminal 1883 monograph Dzieje reformacyi w Polsce, followed by an only slightly fuller survey in Marian Rechowicz’s 1975 history of Polish theology.12 The late fifteen-thirties will be used as a cut-off in this discussion, because they mark the closure of the first phase of the Reformation in Poland – with the death of Piotr Tomicki,bishop of Cracow and chief minister in 1535, and the end of the ageing King Zygmunt I Jagiellon’s (1506–48) ‘first reign’, to borrow a phrase from Elizabethan studies.13 The fifteen-twenties and thirties, moreover, constitute a particularly intense phase of anti-Lutheran polemical printing in the Polish kingdom, which reduced to a trickle from 1540.14 Polish anti-Reformation polemic will be defined here as texts composed within the lands of the Polish crown which engaged directly with the religious controversies and doctrines of the Reformation.15 This article will first introduce Polish anti-Reformation polemic, presenting it within its local and international contexts. Here, the course of the early Reformation

9 D.V.N. Bagchi, Luther’s Earliest Opponents: Catholic Controversialists, 1518–25 (Minneapolis, Minn., 1991); see also ‘Luther’s Catholic opponents’, in The Reformation World, ed. A. Pettegree (2000), pp. 97–108. 10 L. Racaut, Hatred in Print: Catholic Propaganda and Protestant Identity during the French Wars of Religion (Aldershot, 2002); D. Trevor, ‘Thomas More’s Responsio ad Lutherum and the ﬁctions of humanist polemic’, Sixteenth Century Jour., xxxii (2001), 743–64. 11 For the concept of east/west in Europe, see L. Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: the Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, Calif., 1994). 12 J. Bukowski, Dzieje Reformacyi w Polsce od wejs´cia jej do Polski az˙ do jej upadku, i (Cracow, 1883); M. Rechowicz,‘Teologia pozytywno-kontrowersyjna: szkoła polska w XVI wieku’, in Dzieje teologii katolickiej w Polsce, ed. M. Rechowicz (3 vols., Lublin, 1974–6), ii. 35–85. Bukowski’s remains the fullest survey of the early Reformation in Poland (see also M. Borzyszkowski, ‘Tekst i problematyka re˛kopisku De extortu heresis lutherane z 1527 r. na tle polemiki religijnej na Warmii’, Studia Warmin´skie,xi(1974), 5–52). 13 J. Guy, The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade (Cambridge, 1995). For an overview of the reign, see A. Wyczan´ski, Zygmunt Stary (Warsaw, 1985) and A. Odrzywolska-Kidawa, Podkanclerzy Piotr Tomicki (1515–35): polityk i humanista (Warsaw, 2005). 14 For the 1540s anti-Reformation polemics, and Stanisław Hozjusz’s major polemical interventions from 1558, see Rechowicz, ii. 49, 55. For the intense Jesuit-Socinian Polish printed polemics of the 1590s, see P. Wilczek, ‘Catholics and heretics: some aspects of religious debates in the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth’, Sarmatian Review (Apr. 1999), pp. 619–27. 15 These are distinct from the four polemics by foreign authors reprinted in Cracow in this period, i.e., Johannes Eck, Enchiridion Locorum Communium adversus Lutheranos (Cracow, 1525); Erasmus, Hyperaspistes Diatribae adversus Servum Arbitrium Martini Lutheri (Cracow, before Apr. 1525); Henry VIII, Assertio Septem Sacramentorum (Cracow, 1527) (lost); Erasmus, Epistola D. Erasmi Roterdami contra Quosdam qui se Falso Iactant Evangelicos (Cracow, 1530).

Historical Research, vol. 87, no. 235 (February 2014) Copyright © 2013 Institute of Historical Research 46 Anti-Reformation polemic in the kingdom of Poland, 1520–36 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.16 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.This question is important, in light of a tension in the existing scholarship – between a growing body of work which has shown how positively the old church engaged with the early printing industry in the fifteenth century, and a strong strand in sixteenth-century polemics studies which argues that that same church was inherently reluctant to harness the press against the Reformation.17 It will be argued here that the anti-Reformation pamphlets and treatises produced in Zygmunt I’s monarchy represent, and capture, a transitional moment in the institutional church’s relationship with the printing press in this major kingdom.

The Polish monarchy to which King Zygmunt I Jagiellon (d. 1548) was elected in 1505 consisted, in the early sixteenth century, of a constellation of territories. The Polish korona, that is the core territories of the medieval Polish monarchy, included Małopolska (southern Poland) with its royal capital of Cracow,Wielkopolska (western Poland) with its principal city of Poznan´, and Ruthenia-Podolia in the south-east. In 1466, following the Thirteen Years War with the Teutonic Knights, the monarchy had also acquired a new, affluent coastal province known as Royal Prussia, which included the Hanseatic cities of Danzig, Elbing and Thorn.The duchy of Mazovia, ruled by the Piast dynasty, was a vassal territory of the crown, before being finally incorporated into it in 1529. These Polish-Prussian-Ruthene-Mazovian lands will here be referred to collectively as ‘Jagiellonian Poland’ or ‘the Polish monarchy’. As Luther-inspired Reformation steadily took root on the frontiers of Zygmunt I’s territories – in the Holy Roman Empire, Pomerania, Scandinavia, Bohemia and northern Hungary – the Polish monarchy too experienced significant pro-Luther sentiment.18 King Zygmunt issued the first of a string of anti-Lutheran edicts in Thorn, in 1520.19 In 1525, a series of Luther-inspired urban revolts in Danzig (Gdan´sk) and Elbing (Elbla˛g) rocked Royal

16 For the historiography of the early Polish Reformation, see N. Nowakowska, ‘Forgetting Lutheranism: historians and the early Reformation in Poland, 1517–48’, Church History and Religious Culture, xcii (2012), 281–303. 17 For 15th-century ecclesiastical printing, see C. Dondi, ‘The liturgical policies of the Hospitallers between the invention of printing and the Council of Trent: the evidence of the early printed breviaries and missals’, in The Military Orders, iii: History and Heritage, ed. V. Mallia-Milanes (Aldershot, 2008), pp. 63–71; G.-M. Oury,‘The monks of the Renaissance at the heart of the revolution of the printed book’, Cistercian Studies Quarterly, xxxvi (2001), 163–74; J. G. Clark, ‘Print and pre-Reformation religion: the Benedictines and the press, c.1470–c.1550’, in The Uses of Script and Print, 1300–1700, ed. J. Crick and A. Walsham (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 71–94; and N. Nowakowska, ‘From Strassburg to Trent: bishops, printing and liturgical reform in the 15th century’, Past & Present, ccxiii (2011), 3–39. For the church’s nervous attitude to anti-Reformation printing, see Edwards, ‘Catholic controversial literature’, p. 197 and Printing, Propaganda,pp.57–8; Bagchi,‘Luther’s Catholic opponents’, p. 99. 18 For the early Reformation in neighbouring kingdoms, see The Early Reformation in Europe, ed. A. Pettegree (Cambridge, 1992). 19 Corpus Iuris Polonici, iii, ed. O. Balzer (Cracow, 1906), no. 234,p.579.

Prussia, with traditional worship restored only with King Zygmunt’s military intervention the following year.20 Just as dramatically, 1525 saw the Polish crown gain a controversial new vassal territory. By the terms of the Treaty of Cracow of April 1525, the last grand master of the Teutonic Order in Prussia, the Lutheran Albrecht von Hohenzollern, secularized his order’s theocratic Baltic state, offering it to King Zygmunt as a vassal duchy.With the rapid issue of a Reformation ordinance for the new state of Ducal Prussia, the Polish crown became protector and guarantor of the first Lutheran polity in Europe.21 Within the korona too, there was extensive support for Luther. In Cracow, many of King Zygmunt’s top courtiers were openly sympathetic to Wittenberg; ‘Lutheran’ preaching was reported across the city, and over thirty of its citizens were tried for heresy between 1525 and 1533.22 In Poznan´, the city’s humanist Academy (f. 1519) became a hotbed of Lutheran pedagogy, under the protection of great noble families of Wielkopolska such as the Górka and Leszczyn´ski, who sent their sons to Wittenberg University and agitated against the Latin church at national sejms (parliaments).23 By the fifteen-thirties, with the aged king frequently ailing, his son Zygmunt Augustus not yet of age, and the latter’s Lutheran uncle Duke Albrecht eyeing a potential regency, top councillors in Jagiellonian Poland believed that the kingdom might imminently witness a crown-led Reformation.24 In Jagiellonian Poland, as elsewhere, printed texts whose main purpose was to argue against Reformation theology were not born overnight as a coherent genre in 1517 (and in their extreme heterogeneity of form, they arguably never became one), but instead grew organically out of existing segments of the book market.25 Printed polemic in Jagiellonian Poland to 1540 appeared in two phases: 1524–5 (composed principally in Cracow and Prussia) and 1532–6 (composed chiefly in Poznan´).Itisnot the purpose of the following survey to give a strict chronological account of these texts and their printing.That information is presented in Table 1. Rather, what follows is an attempt to reconstruct the evolution of early anti-Reformation printing in the Polish monarchy. David Bagchi has written that the medieval church had bequeathed certain basic forms of anti-heretical writing, principally the sermon and the summa.26 In keeping with this model, in the first half of the fifteenth century Cracow University professors such as Benedykt Hesse (d. 1456), Andrzej of Kokorzyn (d. c.1435), Stanisław of Skabimierz (1360–1431) and Mikołaj of Błonia (c.1400–48) had produced a stream of anti-Hussite sermons and treatises.27 Polish printed theological polemic had first appeared a decade before the Martin Luther affair, when c.1505 the Cracow theologian Johannes Sacranus (Jan of Os´wie˛cim) had attacked the beliefs and practices of the

20 For an overview, see M. Bogucka, ‘Walki społeczne w Gdan´sku w XVI wieku’, in G. Labuda, Szkice z dziejów Pomorza (3 vols., Warsaw, 1958–61), pp. 369–448. 21 For the Reformation in ducal Prussia, see W. Hubatsch, Albrecht von Brandenburg-Ansbach, Deutschordens-Hochmeister und Herzog in Preussen 1490–1568 (Heidelberg, 1960). 22 Bukowski, i. 165–77; W. Zakrzewski, Powstanie i wzrost Reformacyi w Polsce, 1520–72 (Leipzig, 1870), p. 24. 23 K. Mazurkiewicz, Pocza˛tki Akademji Lubran´skiego w Poznaniu (1519–35) (Poznan´, 1921), pp. 27–100; W. Pociecha, ‘Walka sejmowa o przywileje kos´cioła w Polsce w latach 1520–37’, Reformacja w Polsce,ii(1922), 161–84. 24 See, e.g., Acta Tomiciana, xvi a, ed. W. Pociecha (Wrocław-Poznan´-Kraków, 1960), no. 361,pp.659–61. 25 The wide range of genres employed by anti-Reformation polemicists was pointed out by Deylon; see also Bagchi, Luther’s Earliest Opponents,pp.190–6. 26 Bagchi, Luther’s Earliest Opponents,pp.190–4. 27 M. Rechowicz, ‘Po załoz˙eniu wydziału teologicznego w Krakowie’, in Dzieje teologii katolickiej w Polsce (3 vols., Lublin, 1974–6), i. 133–41.

Historical Research, vol. 87, no. 235 (February 2014) Copyright © 2013 Institute of Historical Research 8At-eomto oei ntekndmo oad 1520–36 Poland, of kingdom the in polemic Anti-Reformation 48 oyih 03Isiueo itrclRsac itrclRsac,vl 7 o 3 Fbur 2014) (February 235 no. 87, vol. Research, Historical Research Historical of Institute 2013 © Copyright Table 1. Anti-Reformation polemic composed in Poland, 1517–39

No. Author Title Date of printing First edition Format 1 Pope Leo X/Jan Konarski, Bulla contra Errores Martini Luterij 1520 Cracow, Haller Quarto bishop of Cracow 2 Zaccaria Ferreri, papal nuncio Oratio Legati Apostolici Habita Thorunij in June 1521 Cracow, Haller Quarto and bishop of Gardialfiera Prussia ad Serenissimum Poloniae Regum contra Errores Fratris Martini Lutheri 3 Piotr Rydzin´ski, canon of In Axiomata Ioannis Hessi Wratislaviae Edita April 1524 Cracow,Wietor Quarto Poznan´ 4 Piotr Rydzin´ski Petri Risinii in Iohannis Hessi Cachinnij 1524 Cracow, Ungler Octavo Sycophantias Responsio 5 Andrzej Kryzcki, bishop of Encomia Luteri 1524 Cracow,Wietor Quarto Przemys´l 6 Andrzej Kryzcki De Afflictione Ecclesiae, Commentarius in 1527 Cracow,Wietor Quarto Psalmum XXI 7 Tiedemann Giese, canon of Flosculorum Lutheranorum de Fide et 1525 Cracow,Wietor Octavo Ermland Operibus Anthelogikon 8 Martinus Dobergest, canon of Orationes VI quas contra Martinum Lutherum 1525 Cracow, Scharffenberg Quarto Cracow in Divae Virginis Mariae Basilica ad Studiosam Potissimum Iunventutem 9 Stanisław Bylin´ski, archdeacon Defensorium Ecclesiae adversus Laurentium March 1531 Cracow, Scharffenberg Octavo of Przemys´l Corvinum 10 Grzegorz Szamotulski, Sermo de Indulgentiis 1532 Cracow, Ungler Quarto archdeacon of Poznan´ 11 Grzegorz Szamotulski Anacephaleosis Flosculos Monogrammos ex May 1535 Cracow, Ungler Octavo Progymnasmatis Christophori Endorfini 12 Grzegorz Szamotulski Vincula Hippocratis ad Alligandum Caput 1536 Cracow, Ungler Octavo Christophori Endorfimi Gijrgatum Spirantis 13 Walenty Wróbel, preacher at St. Propugnaculum Ecclesiae adversus Varias 1536 Leipzig, Lotter Octavo Mary Magdalene, Poznan´ Sectas Anti-Reformation polemic in the kingdom of Poland, 1520–36 49

Orthodox church in his tract Elucidarius Errorum Ritus Ruthenici.28 With the coming of the Luther controversy,however, printed polemic did not emerge directly from existing late medieval traditions of anti-heretical writing in the first instance. Instead, in Jagiellonian Poland, anti-Reformation polemic initially grew out of the practice of printing official (papal, episcopal, royal) edicts. In December 1520, the papal bull Exsurge Domine was printed in Cracow on the orders of the city’s bishop, Jan Konarski (reigned 1503–24), accompanied by a short pastoral letter in which Konarski warned his flock directly of the dangers posed by Luther’s errors.29 Here, the line between normative texts of instruction (the bull, the episcopal letter) and texts of persuasion (Konarski’s words of exposition and warning) is a fine one. In June 1521, Cracow’s Haller workshop, which enjoyed a monopoly on the printing of royal documents, produced a compendium of anti-Lutheran edicts and texts which included King Zygmunt’s first mandates against Luther, CharlesV’s Edict of Worms, a polemical anti-Luther oration delivered before the Polish court by Zaccaria Ferreri (1479–1524), bishop of Gardialfiera and papal nuncio to Poland, and a deposition by Ferreri describing his burning of Lutheran books in Thorn.30 Ferreri’s printed oration was here presented as being of a parcel with, and perhaps providing a richer context or gloss for, printed anti-heresy decrees. Only gradually did printed anti-Luther polemic emerge as a stand-alone subject for a printed book in Jagiellonian Poland. Subsequently, Polish anti-Reformation polemic emerged from yet another direction – from literary feuds, or printed polemics exchanged between academic opponents. In spring 1524, Piotr Rydzin´ski (d. c.1558), canon of Poznan´, composed a short, acerbic work, In Axiomata Ioannis Hessi Wratislaviae Edita, a rebuttal of the Reformation articles posted for disputation in Breslau by Johannes Hess (1490−1547), a key figure in Silesian Lutheranism.31 One of Hess’s associates, writing under the pseudonym Paulus Chacinnius, responded to Rydzin´ski in a now lost book of 1524.32 Undeterred, Rydzin´ski replied immediately with Petri Risinii in Iohannis Hessi . . . Responsio.33 Although these Cracow-Breslau booklets discuss new theological arguments about the Eucharist, the Apostolic succession and the meaning of the Word, their tone of savage personal insult, and the rapid, volley-like nature of their printing and exchange, were borrowed from an older tradition of academic printed dispute which predated the Luther affair. Rydzin´ski’s little books were analogous to the highly acrimonious disputations-in-print earlier conducted, for example, between Johann Reuchlin and Johann Pfefferkorn (on Hebrew learning, 1511–13) or Diego López Zúnˇiga and Erasmus of Rotterdam (on humanist translations of the New Testament, 1520–1).34 In Cracow in 1524, we can thus see a genre (printed academic polemic) already established within the European printing industry as a vehicle for vigorous debate over humanist philology now put to use as a platform for exchanges about Lutheran

28 Johannes Sacranus, Elucidarius Errorum Ritus Ruthenici (Cracow, c.1505). 29 Bulla contra Errores Martini Luterij (Cracow, 1520). In Poland, there is no record of printed polemics pre-dating the papal and royal condemnations of Luther in 1520. 30 Zaccaria Ferreri, Oratio Legati Apostolici Habita Thorunij in Prussia ad Serenissimum Poloniae Regem contra Errores Fratris Martini Lutheri (Cracow, 1521); oration text published in Zacharias Ferreri (1519–21) et Nuntii Minores (1522–53), ed. H. D. Wojtyska (Rome, 1992), pp. 108–16. 31 See K. Lutyn´ski, ‘Piotr Rydzin´ski’, Polski słownik biograﬁczny, xxiii (1991–2), 456–7. 32 Lutyn´ski, p. 456. 33 Piotr Rydzin´ski, Petri Risinii in Iohannis Hessi Cachinni Sycophantias Responsio (Cracow, 1524). 34 Johann Reuchlin, Defensio Joannis Reuchlin Phorcensis II. Doctoris Contra Calumniatores suos Colonienses (Tübingen, 1514); Jakob van Hoogstraten, Ad Joannem Ingewinkel Apologia Secunda (Cologne, 1519); M. Bataillon, Erasme et l’Espagne: recherches sur l’histoire spirituelle du XVIe siècle (Paris, 1937), pp. 98–102.

Historical Research, vol. 87, no. 235 (February 2014) Copyright © 2013 Institute of Historical Research 50 Anti-Reformation polemic in the kingdom of Poland, 1520–36 theology.This remained an important genre for anti-Reformation polemic in Poland in the fifteen-thirties. A second tranche of such pamphlets was seen, for example, in Poznanín1535–6, when a long-running dispute between the archdeacon of Poznan´ Grzegorz Szamotulski and noted Saxon humanist and Lutheran Christoph Hegendorff (Endorfinus), both lecturers at the Poznan´ Academy, erupted into print.35 It bore fruit in four pamphlets, variously printed in Cracow, Frankfurt and Wittenberg – Szamotulski’s Anacephaleosis (1535) and Vincula Hippocratis (1536), and Hegendorff’s Querela Eloquentiae (1536) and Helloborus Novus (1536).36 The Poznan´ texts too are close relatives of the books generated by the Reuchlin Affair a generation earlier – both the Reuchlin and Poznan´ polemics painstakingly set out the institutional context in which the respective arguments arose, use wholly hostile language about the author’s opponents, and quote from their opponent’s printed works throughout, organizing them into lists of ‘errors’. In the mid fifteen-twenties, the most prominent of all Polish polemicists, Bishop Andrzej Krzycki, introduced a third genre to Polish anti-Lutheran writing. In 1524 Krzycki (1482–1537) – court poet, bishop of Przemys´l and rising star of the Polish episcopal establishment – composed a letter to King Zygmunt against Luther, printed as the Encomia Luteri in Cracow by Hieronymus Wietor, and reprinted across the Holy Roman Empire.37 The letter per se was obviously an ancient genre, used by the church fathers and medieval clergymen such as Bernard of Clairvaux, but it was celebrated and revived in particular by humanists, from Petrarch onwards. By 1500 several hundred epistolae addressed to abbots, popes, princes and scholars had rolled off the printing presses of Europe, and Krzycki was the first in Jagiellonian Poland to employ this mainstream form of printed text against the Reformation.38 Stanisław Bylin´ski, archdeacon of Przemys´l, built on his bishop’s epistle-as-polemic approach in 1531, with his Defensorium Ecclesiae adversus Laurentium Corvinum.39 Here Bylin´ski reproduced (or claimed to reproduce) the correspondence which he had exchanged in the years 1525–7 with his late friend Laurentius Corvinus (d. 1527), humanist, city official and a leading light of the Breslau Reformation.40 The Defensorium included three brief letters by Corvinus on the joys of his Lutheran faith, and three lengthy defences of orthodoxy by Bylin´ski. The publication of a set of correspondence and replies was also a highly recognizable product within a printing industry which had for decades issued the collected letters of prominent humanists, most famously those of Erasmus of Rotterdam.41 Bylin´ski, and his printer Scharffenberg, are here redeploying in Jagiellonian Poland the classic epistolae collection as anti-Lutheran polemic.

35 For Hegendorff’s career in Poland and beyond, see F. Bierlaire, ‘Christoph Hegendorff’, in Contemporaries of Erasmus: a Biographical Register of the Renaissance and Reformation, ed. P.G. Bietenholz and Thomas B. Deutscher (3 vols., Toronto, 1985–7), ii. 171–2. 36 For a monographic study of this dispute, see Mazurkiewicz. 37 Andrzej Krzycki, Encomia Luteri (Cracow, 1524); see also S. Zabłocki, ‘Andrzej Krzycki’, Polski słownik biograﬁczny,xv(1970), 544–9. The reprints of the Encomia included: Regensburg (Paul Kohl, 1524), Dresden (Emserpresse, 1524), Strassburg (Johann Grüninger, 1524), Speyer (Konrad Hist, 1524) and Rome (Bachiensis, 1524). 38 See Incunabula Short Title Catalogue, which has 336 incunabula with the title ‘epistola ad’ [accessed 17 Aug. 2012]. 39 Stanisław Bylin´ski, Defensorium Ecclesiae adversus Laurentium Corvinum (Cracow, 1531). For Bylin´ski’s career, see H. Bagin´ski, ‘Stanisław Bylin´ski’, in Polski słownik biograﬁczny, iii (1937), 170–1. 40 For Corvinus’s career, see G. McDonald, ‘Laurentius Corvinus a renesansowe miasto Wrocław’, in Wrocław Literacki, ed. M. Kopij, W. Kunicki and T. Schulz (Wrocław, 2007), pp. 47–62. 41 Erasmus, Epistolae D. Erasmi Roterodami ad Diversos (Basel, 1521).

Bishop Krzycki himself, meanwhile, continued to experiment with different forms of anti-Reformation writing. His second polemic, De Afflictione Ecclesiae (1527), was a Scriptural commentary, which cast anti-Reformation writing as humanist lament.42 In this commentary on Psalm XXI, a reprise of Luther’s own earlier publication on the same text, Krzycki vividly depicted the Reformation as the crucifixion of the church.43 Other authors were content to revive, or reinvent, the classic medieval anti-heretical forms of the sermon and summa.In1524, Piotr Tomicki, bishop of Cracow, instructed his prized preacher Martin Dobergest (or Dobrogost) to preach a cycle of anti-Lutheran sermons for university students in St. Mary’s church.These were printed in 1525 as the (now lost) Orationes VI . . . contra Martinum Lutherum.44 A sermon given by Grzegorz Szamotulski (d. 1551), archdeacon of Poznan´, in which the author defended a papal indulgence issued for the maintenance of Vilnius cathedral against Lutheran teaching, was likewise printed in Cracow, in 1532.45 Two treatises on Reformation teaching, and its refutation, were also composed in Jagiellonian Poland, theoretically descendants of the anti-Hussite and anti-Orthodox tracts composed by Cracow theology professors from the early fifteenth century. In 1525, Wietor printed the Flosculorum Lutheranorum de Fide et Operibus Anthelogikon by Tiedemann Giese (1480–1550), confidante of Nicholas Copernicus and canon of Ermland in Royal Prussia.46 The Anthelogikon consisted of a reproduction of 110 Lutheran theses authored in Ducal Prussia by Dr. Johann Briesemann, and Giese’s gentle forty-page refutation of them.47 A second, much more substantial, treatise was composed a decade later by the Poznan´ Academy lecturer Walenty Wróbel (Valentinus Passerinus, or Posnanitanus), in 1536. Wróbel’s Propugnaculum Ecclesiae adversus Varias Sectas opens with a dedicatory letter to Erazm Ciołek, humanist abbot of the Cistercian abbey of Mogiła, before launching into a refutation of ten heretical propositions over 300 pages.48 Older genres of anti-heretical writing were therefore successfully transposed into print in Jagiellonian Poland, and represented some of the weightiest (both literally and metaphorically) local interventions on the Reformation crisis. As elsewhere in Europe, from glosses of printed edicts, personal academic confrontations, letters, orations, sermons and laments to treatises, the anti-Reformation books printed by the workshops of early sixteenth-century Cracow did not therefore form a single, new genre; rather, the anti-Lutheran element was grafted onto existing, well-established kinds of printed books, onto both those forms forged and revived by the world of humanism, and those which predated it.49

42 Andrzej Krzycki, De Afflictione Ecclesiae, Commentarius in Psalmum XXI (Cracow, 1527).A second edition was printed in Rome by F. M. Calvo, 1527. 43 Martin Luther, Martini Lutheri Lucubrationes in Psalmum XXI (Basel, 1522). 44 K. Gabryel, Działalnosć´ kosćielna biskupa Piotra Tomickiego, 1464–1535 (Studia z Historii Kosćioła w Polsce, War saw, 1972), pp. 390–1; catalogued by K. Estreicher, Bibliografia polska, xv (Cracow, 1896), p. 263. 45 Grzegorz Szamotulski, Sermo de indulgentiis (Cracow, 1532). 46 For Giese’s career, see T. Borawska, Tiedemann Giese (1480–1550)wz˙yciu wewne˛trznym Warmii i Prus Królewskich (Olsztyn, 1984). 47 Tiedemann Giese, Flosculorum Lutheranorum de Fide et Operibus Anthelogikon (Cracow, 1525) (hereafter Anthelogikon). For the Reformation in Ermland, see H. Zins, ‘The political and social background of the early Reformation in Ermeland’, Eng. Hist. Rev., lxxv (1960), 589–600. 48 Walenty Wróbel, Propugnaculum Ecclesiae adversus Varias Sectas huius Tempestatis (Frankfurt, 1536). 49 The genres employed in Cracow-printed Latin polemic show significant overlap with those used in Flugschriften printed in the Holy Roman Empire between 1520 and 1525, which included sermons, letters, commentaries and parodies (see J. Schwitalla, Deutsche Flugschriften 1460–1525: textsortengeschichtliche Studien (Tübingen, 1983), pp. 88–108).

Where does this roll-call of printed anti-Reformation polemic from Jagiellonian Poland sit within a broader European context? Statistically, the quantity of printed anti-Reformation texts composed in the Polish monarchy by 1540 (thirteen) is comparable to that of other major kingdoms – Klaiber’s database identifies some fifteen locally authored works for France, for example, while the number for Tudor England is at least nineteen.50 Bagchi has calculated that, beyond the Holy Roman Empire, ‘Catholic controversialists’ were typically very senior clergy (for example, bishops) or academics (for example, the theology professors of Louvain), and here the profile of Polish-Prussian polemicists, the majority of them cathedral canons, is perhaps more junior.51 In Jagiellonian Poland, polemicists were also more likely to be humanists than elsewhere – of the fifty-seven authors studied by Bagchi who had published against Luther before 1526, he classified 33 per cent as scholastic and only 20 per cent as clear-cut humanists.52 In Poland, those who took up their pens against Luther before 1526 were (all six) well known or emerging humanist authors, as we shall see. Anti-Reformation polemic in Jagiellonian Poland was notable too for being composed exclusively in Latin up until 1546, at a time when top polemicists in the Holy Roman Empire and beyond routinely published in the vernacular.53 Perhaps only the city of Cologne produced a comparable, Latin-only body of anti-Luther polemic in this period.54 The pronounced Latinity of anti-Reformation polemic in Zygmunt I’s kingdom can be attributed to the consciously humanist character of these texts (which will be explored below), to the importance of Latin as a method of communication in a realm with three vernaculars (Polish, German and Ruthene), and to the fact that after 1525 Lutheran sympathizers in the korona were typically Latin-educated elites – students, academics, wealthy burghers, courtiers and noblemen.55 David Birch has written of Latin as a ‘protective shield’, and it is sometimes presented as a language chosen deliberately to limit religious polemic to a small, elite and preferably clerical readership.56 Research by Andrzej Wyczan´ski and Zdzisław Noga has demonstrated, however, that by the fifteen-twenties Latin was no longer just the language of the church, chancellery and university in Jagiellonian Poland. Cracow University had seen a sustained boom in enrolments – from 2,608 ‘native’ young men between 1480 and 1490,to3,215 by the period 1500–10 – and those crowding its lecture halls were increasingly likely to be the sons of noblemen, or

50 Calculated from Klaiber (Birch, pp. 23–6, 91–4). 51 Bagchi, ‘Luther’s Catholic opponents’, p. 228. 52 Bagchi, Luther’s Earliest Opponents,p.189. 53 D. R. Janz, ‘Johann Eck’, in Bietenholz and Deutsch, i. 417–19; I. Guenther, ‘Johannes Cochlaeus’, in Bietenholz and Deutsch, i. 321–2.Vernacular anti-Reformation polemic was also widespread in England and the Netherlands (see A. da Costa, Reforming Printing: Syon Abbey’s Defence of Orthodoxy, 1525–34 (Oxford, 2012) and A. Pettegree, Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion (Cambridge, 2005), p. 174). The ﬁrst Polish-language anti-Reformation polemic was by Stanisław of Szczordrowice, Rozmowa nova, niektórego Pielgrzyma z Gospodarzem, o niektórych ceremoniach koscielnych (1546) (Rechowicz, ii. 68). 54 Volkmar, p. 117. 55 For an overview of the early Reformation in Poland and its adherents, see Bukowski. For the uses of Latin in early modern Europe, see P. Burke,‘Latin: a language in search of a community’, in Languages and Community in Early Modern Europe, ed. P. Burke (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 43–60; F. Waquet, Latin, or the Empire of a Sign: from the 16th to the 20th Centuries, trans. J. Howe (2001); Latinity and Alterity in the Early Modern Period, ed. Y. Haskell and J. Feros Ruys (Tempe, Ariz., 2010). For Latin in early modern Poland, see Łacina jako je˛zyk elit, ed. J. Axer (Warsaw, 2004). 56 Birch, p. 29; Edwards, ‘Catholic controversial literature’, pp. 191, 197.

Copyright © 2013 Institute of Historical Research Historical Research, vol. 87, no. 235 (February 2014) Anti-Reformation polemic in the kingdom of Poland, 1520–36 53 of afﬂuent burgers.57 Noga’s data reveals, for example, that in the period 1517–36 at least ten of Cracow’s thirty-nine city councillors had received a Latin university education.58 In Jagiellonian Poland, Latin was the language of an elite, but it was the language of a steadily expanding elite.Anti-Reformation polemic in King Zygmunt I’s kingdom thus had a distinctive proﬁle in some respects – more humanist and more Latin than the European norm, if such a thing existed.

What, then, were Polish and Prussian high clergy before 1540 hoping to accomplish by writing anti-heretical texts directed against the Reformation? Printed polemic represents, first, an attempt by clerical authors to influence the anti-heresy policies of the Polish crown and episcopate. Just under half the polemics in Table 1 (five) include a direct address to those in power, and use flattery, admonition and threat in an apparent attempt to harden official approaches. Bishop Ferreri’s Oratio (1521)to Zygmunt I closed, for example, with an appeal for that pious monarch, already a ‘lumen ecclesiae’, to do more against heterodoxy.59 Andrzej Krzycki, in his Encomia Luteri, warned the king that the ‘plague’ of Lutheranism inevitably brought in its wake social discord and political disobedience, urging him to protect Poland not just from the Ottomans, but also from this internal threat, as part of his royal duty.60 Dedicating his Defensorium Ecclesiae (1531) to the bishop of Przemys´l, Jan Karnkowski (1472–37), Stanisław Bylin´ski expressed the hope that the prelate would extinguish the fires of Lutheran heresy raging in the south-eastern Polish diocese.61 Grzegorz Szamotulski, meanwhile, in a particularly animated passage of the Vincula Hippocratis (1536), angrily addressed Bishop Jan Latalski of Poznan´(1464–1540), contrasting the zeal of ‘glorious Frankfurt, always free and clear of Lutheran dogmas’, with Latalski’s tolerance of the ‘monster’ Hegendorff, ‘a supporter and public defender of Lutheran dogma amongst your flock’.62 All of these authors had direct personal access to the higher authorities whom they here addressed at a distance via the printed book – Ferreri in his audiences with the king of Poland, Krzycki as a prominent courtier, Bylin´ski and Szamotulski as senior canons. Moreover, it was precisely part of the role of a bishop or canon to offer counsel, to kings and prelates respectively, in the fora provided by the royal council and the cathedral chapter.The printing of anti-Reformation polemics is thus an attempt by these authors to move beyond the act of offering ‘private’ counsel behind closed doors. Steven Pincus and Peter Lake have argued that, in an early modern English context, the authors of printed pronouncements on crown policy presented such publications as legitimate interventions by adopting the traditional language of petition and counsel, and it is possible that we see the same processes and strategies at work here in Zygmunt I’s kingdom.63 Print made possible the articulation of counsel about heresy in new, maybe amplified, ways.

57 A. Wyczan´ski,‘Rola uniwersytetu jagiellon´skiego w pierwszej połowie XVI wieku’, Kwartalnik Historyczny, lxxi (1964), 3–16; Z. Noga, Krakowska rada miejska w XVI wieku: studium o elicie władzy (Cracow, 2003). 58 Noga, pp. 142–51, 292–354. 59 Wojtyska, p. 116. 60 Krzycki, Encomia Luteri,fo.5. 61 Bylin´ski, fos. 3r–v. 62 Szamotulski, Vincula Hippocratis, fos. 31–2: ‘O iusignis [sic] Francphordia semper a Lutheri dogmatibus immunis & libera . . . Quamdum Reverend. Pontifex (in cuius diocesi haec bellua agrum stulticiae depasta latitat) hunc tam egregium dogmatis lutherani favorum & publicum defensorem in tuo grege tolerabis’. 63 P. Lake and S. C. A. Pincus, ‘Rethinking the public sphere in early modern England’, in The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England, ed. P. Lake and S. C. A. Pincus (Manchester, 2007), pp. 1–30,atp.5.

A second, key purpose of printed polemic was, of course, to disseminate arguments demonstrating the religious ‘errors’ of Luther and his followers, stressing, for example, Luther’s alleged doctrinal inconsistency, the impossibility of constructing a stable church on sola scriptura, and the Holy Spirit’s role as guarantor of ecclesiastical truth. Such anti-Reformation arguments were being ostensibly communicated, in the first instance, to named ‘heretics’ themselves. The books’ titles suggest as much: An Oration against the Errors of Brother Martin Luther, On the Principles of Johannes Hess, A Defence of the Church against Laurentius Corvinus, On the Flowers of Christoph Hegendorff’s Schoolbook. In all these cases, printed polemic functioned as a long-distance (or regional) form of communication, for the reformers thus addressed were all abroad – Luther in Saxony, Hegendorff in Frankfurt (to which the latter fled in 1535), Corvinus and Hess in Silesia. Polish printed polemic against Reformation supporters thus occurred where the possibility of any other kind of public dialogue was impeded by physical distance, or where it had simply broken down. Printed polemic directed against a single named Lutheran nonetheless had another purpose – to convert not only the subject himself (which could equally be, and was, attempted via private letters), but also to convey to a wider audience in Jagiellonian Poland and beyond theological arguments against Martin Luther and his followers.64 The intended Latin-reading audiences for those arguments are, in part, identified for us by the polemicists themselves.The group seen by these high clerical agents to be most at risk of conversion to Lutheranism were local students.The full title of Dobergest’s (lost) 1524–5 Cracow sermons was, for example, Six Orations against Luther given in Saint Mary’s Church for Students. In the preface to his Anacephaleosis (1535), Szamotulski similarly declared that he wrote to correct the thinking of the (Poznan´ Academy) students so that they did not imbibe any of the ‘perverse’ doctrines circulating among the Poles.65 Here, Lutheran teaching and its local exponents are attacked in print specifically for the spiritual benefit of a teenage, lay, Latinate readership. Printed polemic, therefore, had the potential to save the souls of both distant heretics and their educated, local would-be followers. The airing of anti-Reformation arguments in print also sought to shape a ‘Catholic’ identity. It is sometimes argued that pre-modern religious polemics were not serious attempts to persuade heretics to abandon their beliefs, but written instead to rally a ‘home’ audience. Anne Hudson and others have suggested, for example, that the fifteenth-century English anti-Lollard author Thomas Netter of Walden (d. 1430) wrote his great Doctrinale for an orthodox, rather than a heterodox (or potentially heterodox) readership – that heresy presented an opportunity for the Latin church to elucidate its key teachings to itself above all.66 Edwards too has argued that Martin Luther’s own later polemics were intended overwhelmingly for a persuaded Lutheran audience and not his actual opponents.67 There is evidence that a key purpose of Polish anti-Reformation polemic was, similarly, to delineate precisely the Roman alternative to Luther, and to create (even imagine) an orthodox community via the printed book. It is often remarked that the late medieval church was characterized by its theological

64 E.g., Bishop Ferreri’s unprinted letter to Martin Luther, attempting to convert him, sent from Poland (Wojtyska, pp. 119–23). 65 Szamotulski, Anacephaleosis,fo.2v, ‘dogmate perverso’. 66 A. Hudson,‘Thomas Netter’s Doctrinale and the Lollards’, in Thomas Netter of Walden: Carmelite, Diplomat and Theologian (c.1372–1430), ed. J. Bergström-Allen and R. Copsey (Faversham, 2009), pp. 179–97,atp.197. 67 M. U. Edwards, Jr., Luther’s Last Battles: Politics and Polemics, 1531–46 (Leiden, 1983), p. 204.

Copyright © 2013 Institute of Historical Research Historical Research, vol. 87, no. 235 (February 2014) Anti-Reformation polemic in the kingdom of Poland, 1520–36 55 porousness, as famously argued by Joseph Lortz and others.68 In the world of the fifteen-twenties and thirties, where the boundaries between heresy and orthodoxy were dangerously fuzzy, polemic might be an attempt not only to spell out orthodoxy, but also actually to create it on the ground. If orthodoxy, as a social, institutional and intellectual force, requires a degree of articulation and consensus, the printed book was one way of delineating its all-important boundaries. Pope Leo X, Zygmunt I and his bishops had issued terse edicts in Jagiellonian Poland condemning Martin Luther; polemics are an attempt to build on these sparse texts, describing and thinking through ‘publicly’ the differences between ‘the new evangelicals’ and the old church. This was attempted in a variety of ways. Woodcuts, for example, visualized the old church for their readers. The frontispiece of Bylin´ski’s Defensorium Ecclesiae (1531) depicts Pentecost: Mary is shown holding an open book and surrounded by Apostles, touched with flames, while a light-emitting dove hovers above the group. One of Bylin´ski’s main arguments against Corvinus was that sola scriptura was a nonsense, because Scripture could only be interpreted through the illumination of the Holy Spirit, which Christ has promised would reside within the Roman church. This 1531 woodcut thus not only offers a visual representation of the Roman church per se, but visually defines that church against the Reformation – the Mother of God holds the Scriptures which only the church, inspired by the Spirit and descended from the Apostles, has the right to interpret. The frontispiece of Sacranus’s Elucidarius Errorum Ritus Ruthenici (c.1505) had similarly offered a visualization of the Roman church as defined against another community, the Orthodox church, with its rejection of papal supremacy.That image had showed the pope in tiara, flanked by cardinals and bishops, with Orthodox clergy in pointy hats exiting stage-right. Early sixteenth-century Polish woodcut depictions of the Roman church itself were thus shaped directly by the Other of the moment; the Roman church in these images exists in opposition to (and is itself defined by) the alternatives. Textually too, the polemics from Jagiellonian Poland try to articulate a ‘Catholic’ identity by carving out two sides in the early Reformation debate, creating a clear sense of ‘us’ and ‘them’.The Ermland canon Felix Ricus (Reich), in a letter prefacing Giese’s Anthelogikon (1525), contrasts the splendid pious past of ‘Prussia, our dearest fatherland’, with the current Lutheran chaos, building two separate identities by drawing a stark contrast between the good ‘Catholic’ past and the bad Reformation present.69 Szamotulski, in the preface to his 1531 sermon, co-opts the ‘lector’ him/ herself into an us/them scenario, by lamenting to (and by implication with) the ‘splendid and pious reader’ (piety functioning as a code for ‘orthodox’ in this literature) the impiety of these calamitous times, when religious controversies raged like harpies.70 Krzycki’s lament, De Afflictione, is written in the first person, punctuated with declarations such as ‘I am the one Catholic church, in which the communion of saints exists, and in which there is remission of sins’.71 Krzycki here adopts a style which

68 J. Lortz, The Reformation in Germany, trans. R. Walls (2 vols., 1968), i. 143–50. The existence or otherwise of orthodoxy in this period has also been discussed, e.g. by L. E. C. Wooding, Rethinking Catholicism in Reformation England (Oxford, 2000), pp. 3–4 and J. K. Farge, Orthodoxy and Reform in Early Reformation France: the Faculty of Theology of Paris, 1500–43 (Leiden, 1985). 69 Giese, Anthelogikon, Ricus’s letter to the author. 70 Szamotulski, Sermo,fo.1v. 71 Krzycki, De Afﬂictione, penultimate page of lament: ‘Una sim catholica ecclesia, in qua est communio sanctorum & remissio peccatorum’.

Historical Research, vol. 87, no. 235 (February 2014) Copyright © 2013 Institute of Historical Research 56 Anti-Reformation polemic in the kingdom of Poland, 1520–36 makes the historic, theological and institutional identity of the Roman church tangible to his readers by literally making it speak. Several polemicists, moreover, tried to forge a traditionalist/orthodox identity in print with reference to Polish history specifically. Rydzin´ski’s 1524 polemics, for example, contrasted orthodox Cracow with ‘heretical’ Breslau both implicitly (by presenting the theological-literary feud as a contest between the two cities, one pious, one heterodox) and explicitly.A poem printed with Rydzin´ski’s second work invoked the conversion of Breslau to Christianity by Duke Mieszko (d. 992), the celebrated first ruler of Poland, an achievement now undone by the local ‘demons’ subverting the faith in Silesia.72 Walenty Wróbel’s Propugnaculum, in its dedicatory letter to Abbot Ciołek, attributed Poland’s miraculous survival in the face of ongoing Tartar, Vallachian, Ottoman and Muscovite military assaults to the singing of divine office by great numbers of monks and clergy, and to the piety of the ruling Jagiellonian dynasty and its nobility. Lutheran reform, with its abolition of monastic prayer, is presented not only as an inversion of the historic devotional practices of the Polish kingdom, but through its rejection of them as a threat to its very territorial existence.73 Here,Wróbel defines Polish history as ‘pious’, and against the Reformation. In differentiating the ‘pious’ from ‘heretics’ in these ways, printed polemic played its own role in opening up sixteenth-century Europe’s religious schism.74 Jesse Lander has argued that the Reformation and the printing press together gave birth to a new literary genre in the early sixteenth century, that of polemic.75 If we understand the Reformation itself as the process by which the universal medieval church split into two polarized Christian communities, then we might invert Jesse Lander’s equation, and suggest that it was not the Reformation which spawned polemic, but rather printed polemic which was essential to the creation of the Reformation.

So far, the functions of printed polemical books have been explored with reference to their audience – kings, bishops, heretics and the ‘pious’, all of them in urgent need of different kinds of persuasion in the fifteen-twenties and thirties. There were further reasons for writing and printing, however, centred on the author himself, his self-perception, self-presentation and ultimately his self-fashioning via the printed book. One clue as to this function of printed polemic can be found in the Jagiellonian Library’s catalogues, which reveal that of the 154 religious books printed in Poland between 1500 and 1540 which survive in that leading national collection, only seventy-five carried the name of an author, and twenty of those were polemics (anti-Reformation, anti-Orthodox or anti-Jewish).76 Put simply, a printed polemical text was more strongly associated with a (usually living) author than other major kinds of printed religious text (for example, liturgy, hagiography). One of the authorial identities, or roles, presented in these volumes is that of the high clerical author as good pastor and priest, protecting his flock by taking up his pen against the Reformation. The woodcut printed at the end of Tiedemann Giese’s

72 Rydzin´ski, ﬁnal page. 73 Wróbel, unnumbered pages, dedicatory letter. 74 In contrast to Sacranus’s early 16th-century anti-Orthodox polemic, which was reinforcing an existing religious schism, rather than feeling its way around a new one. 75 J. M. Lander, Inventing Polemic: Religion, Print, and Literary Culture in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2006), p. 1. 76 Calculated on the basis of Katalog poloników XVI wieku Biblioteki Jagiellon´skiej, ed. M. Gołuszka, M. Malicki and E. Zwinogrodzka (3 vols., Cracow, 1992–5).

Anthelogikon, for example, shows the author in his canon’s robes, holding a rosary and kneeling before the crucified Christ. Here, Giese is presented first and foremost as devout senior priest. The author’s concern to protect the church from heresy, voiced and demonstrated at length in the treatise itself, is in this closing woodcut visualized and more acutely personified for the reader. Nuncio Ferreri was likewise depicted on the frontispiece to his 1521 oration, at his desk in clerical garb, mitre and crosier within reach and quill in hand, awaiting the Spirit of God which appears to be shining through an open window onto him. The Psalm quotation printed beneath reads: ‘Let your face shine upon your servant, O Lord, and teach me your statutes’.77 The act of writing polemic against Luther by high clergy is in this image thus presented as inspired and holy. Stanisław Bylin´ski too used his Defensorium Ecclesiae (1531) to present himself as a model archdeacon, albeit in a textual preface rather than a printed image. It was a basic duty of that clerical office (‘officij mei’), he wrote to his bishop, to protect the Lord’s flock against robbers, ‘not to keep silence, but to bark and call out; with the lord’s help to keep the wolves away from the sheep’.78 The letters exchanged between Grzegorz Szamotulski and his ally Walenty Wróbel, printed as prefatory material to the Vincula Hippocratis (1536), also dwell on this point. Szamotulski stressed that he had denounced Hegendorff to Poznan´’s bishop and chapter because it had been his duty as archdeacon (‘ex officio archidiaconali’) to do so, and that he had subsequently begun his printed campaign against Hegendorff – presenting polemic as an extension of his canonical anti-heretical activities.79 These printed books thus embody the author’s claim to be a worthy pastor.The diligent senior priest is also here presented as one who equips his clerical subordinates with anti-heresy arguments. In his Propugnaculum (1536), Walenty Wróbel explained he had printed his work because ‘many clergy complain that they do not always know how to respond to the objections [made by heretics]’.80 Szamotulski too, in the Anacephaleosis (1535), although a work addressed to students, explained that it had been his intention for some time to write a book to educate the clergy of the diocese.81 In all these ways, printed polemics made the point that anti-heretical zeal, in the face of the Reformation, should be a key facet of high clerical office. In a parallel kind of self-fashioning, the majority of the clerical authors in Table 1 consciously present themselves in their polemics as humanists. These printed books are meant to act as a demonstration of the author’s adherence to the (not so) new learning, to advance humanist reputations and careers, and to signal or solicit membership of international humanist networks. The frontispiece of Zaccaria Ferreri’s Oratio (1521), for example, not only shows the accomplished Roman humanist as pious cleric, but also as a scholar in his library, with books on the shelves above him, and more books stashed in front of his desk – an iconography of learning which the humanists tried to make their own.82 Piotr Rydzin´ski, meanwhile, used

77 Ferreri, Oratio, frontispiece: ‘Faciem tuam illumina super servum tuum domine et doce me justiﬁcationes tuas’ (Psalm 118 (119)). 78 Bylin´ski, fo. 3: ‘non tacere sed calano et latratu, deo adiutore instar canis lupos ad ovili arcere’. 79 Grzegorz Szamotulski, Vincula Hippocratis (unnumbered pages). 80 Wróbel, dedicatory letter (unnumbered pages): ‘multi ex clero querebantur, se non semper scire ad obiectiones respondere’. 81 Grzegorz Szamotulski, Anacephaleosis,fo.2v. 82 Ferreri, frontispiece. For Ferreri’s scholarly accomplishments, see E. Stöve, ‘Zaccaria Ferreri’, in Dizionario biograﬁco degli italiani, xlvi (Rome, 1996), 808–11. For the iconography of humanist scholarship, see L. Jardine, Erasmus, Man of Letters: the Construction of Charisma in Print (Princeton, N.J., 1993), pp. 27–82.

Historical Research, vol. 87, no. 235 (February 2014) Copyright © 2013 Institute of Historical Research 58 Anti-Reformation polemic in the kingdom of Poland, 1520–36 anti-Reformation polemic as a vehicle to launch his literary humanist career – in his attacks on the Breslau Lutherans, the Latin puns and abundant classical references (invoking, for example, the ancient feuds of Clodius and Milo) seem to be just as much the author’s purpose as the actual religious content of his text.83 Stanisław Bylin´ski, dedicating his Defensorium Ecclesiae to Bishop Karnkowski, praised his patron as ‘a lover and supporter of good letters’, thereby presenting himself as a humanist supplicant and client.84 Andrzej Krzycki, meanwhile, used polemic to build on his existing reputation as an accomplished humanist poet, including in these volumes his own anti-Reformation neo-Latin verses, such as In Imaginem Lutheri and Conditiones Boni Luterani (1524).85 The satirical Encomia Luteri (1524), with its likely allusion to Erasmus’s celebrated Moriae Encomium (1511), indeed boosted Krzycki’s international humanist reputation, and was read and praised by Erasmus himself in autumn 1525.86 Printers too took care to present many of these polemics as avowedly humanist products, as part of their own self-fashioning or market pitch. In the fifteen-twenties, most Polish anti-Reformation polemic (four out of seven titles) was printed by the Austrian Hieronymus Wietor, who had established himself in Cracow in 1518 with the specific ambition of becoming the kingdom’s prestige humanist printer, a Polish Aldus.87 The workshop’s anti-Reformation polemic was an important part of its humanist profile. The title pages of the Encomia Luteri and of Giese’s Anthelogikon proudly included Greek fonts, for example, which Wietor had developed specifically for the humanist market. Visually, the title pages of the Wietor polemics are also recognizably humanist, employing the architectural frames and classicizing motifs (cherubs, columns, victory garlands) which had first been developed in fifteenth-century Italian humanist manuscripts.88 The workshop employed this style of frontispiece for its editions of Erasmus, the classics and Jagiellonian dynastic panegyric, thereby bracketing anti-Reformation polemic as a similarly prestigious genre, and distinct from Wietor’s less ornate products, such as astrological ‘prognosticons’ and vernacular Polish religious works, which were graced with cruder frontispiece woodcuts or none at all.89 Printed polemics were thus a way of making claims about an author’s identity, and perhaps that of his printer too – before the fellow clergy of the Polish church, and before an audience of fellow humanists, in central Europe and beyond.

Polish printed polemics of the ﬁfteen-twenties and thirties were not, however, concerned only with denouncing the Reformation and constructing carefully honed personae for their creators. Beneath the topsoil of anti-Lutheran rhetoric, there is a second polemic conducted here between the ‘orthodox’ authors themselves – a contest over whether humanism was the Roman church’s best weapon against the

83 Rydzin´ski, Petri Risinii in Iohannis Hessi (unnumbered pages). 84 Bylin´ski, Defensorium Ecclesiae, dedicatory letter: ‘vale bonarum literarum amator ac cultor’. 85 Both printed with the Encomia Luteri. 86 Opus Epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami, ed. P.S. Allen and others (12 vols., Oxford, 1906–58), vi, no. 1629, pp. 193–5. 87 For Wietor as humanist printer, see A. Kawecka-Grzycowa, Drukarze dawnej polski od XV do XVIII wieku, i: Małopolska (Warsaw-Wrocław, 1983), pp. 337–9. 88 M. Davies,‘Humanism in script and print in the 15th century’, in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, ed. J. Kraye (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 47–62,atp.52. 89 E.g., the frontispieces to Wietor’s: Johann Alexander Brassicanus, In feliciss, puerperium sereniss. Dn. Annae Ungariae et Boemiae Reginae (Cracow, 1528); Jan z Koszycek, Rozmowy, które mial król Salomon ma˛dry z marchołtem grubym (Cracow, 1521); Mikołaj Schadek, Prognosticon accidentium (Cracow, 1519).

Reformation, or whether it was the original cause of the new heresies. In Jagiellonian Poland, the institutional breakthrough of humanism had coincided almost exactly with Luther’s schism from Rome: in 1518 Rudolph Agricola junior took up a new chair of poetry at Cracow University jointly erected by three Polish bishops, while in 1519 Bishop Jan Lubran´ski founded the Poznan´ Academy, specifically as a humanist school.90 In 1520, King Zygmunt I issued his first anti-Lutheran edict.91 Some observers in the Polish monarchy saw these phenomena as causally linked. By c.1522, instruction in Greek at Cracow University had been suspended because of accusations that it led to heresy; Georgius Libanus, brought to the Polish capital by Bishop Piotr Tomicki to teach Greek, found himself unable to lecture, a fact he bitterly lamented in his own printed works.92 In 1523, the Cracow printers Marcus Scharffenberg and Hieronymus Wietor prefaced an edition of Erasmus’s Opus de Conscribendis Epistolis with their own defence of humanist Greek and Hebrew learning, against the charge that such studies were a source of heresy.93 The many claims made in our printed polemics about the relationship between Reformation and humanism should therefore be read in light of that Polish intellectual and ecclesiastical conflict. Andrzej Krzycki’s Encomia Luteri (1524) openly evoked Desiderius Erasmus against Martin Luther, casting the Dutchman, before the king, as an impeccably orthodox authority to juxtapose with the Saxon friar.94 Krzycki’s De Afflictione (1527) was prefaced with a poem by Stanisław Hozjusz (Hosius), the future Counter Reformation figurehead. In this verse, Hozjusz claims that it is precisely Krzycki’s skills (‘ingenium’) as a humanist – his gift for Latin versifying – which make him ideally skilled to defend the church, the desecrated vineyard for which Christ had shed his blood.95 Stanisław Bylin´ski, meanwhile, took a different tack in his 1531 polemic, attempting to delegitimize and mock Lutheranism precisely by arguing that it was anti-humanist. Bylin´ski claimed that Luther’s desire to build faith on Scripture alone was flawed, because sola scriptura denied Lutherans access to the learning of Pomponius, Modestinus, Hermogenes and a host of other pagan authors.96 For these Polish authors, humanism was orthodox (or even a hallmark of orthodoxy, for Bylin´ski), and the church’s most promising resource against Martin Luther. By contrast, the most prolific of all Polish early sixteenth-century polemicists, the indefatigable Grzegorz Szamotulski, saw no meaningful distinctions at all between humanist scholarship and Lutheranism itself. His first attack on Hegendorff, the Anacephaleosis (1535), is a line-by-line assault on the latter’s best-selling humanist textbook for schoolboys, identifying nine ‘articulos’ or points on which the text was ‘heretical’. Some highly successful humanist pedagogy is thus presented by Szamotulski as spiritually dangerous to boys. In the Vincula Hippocractis (1536), Hegendorff is in turn attacked for being hostile to and inept in older forms of scholastic learning – for

90 See J. Glomski, Patronage and Humanist Literature in the Age of the Jagiellons: Court and Career in the Writings of Rudolf Agricola Junior,Valentin Eck, and Leonard Cox (Toronto, 2007); M. Goetel-Kopffowa,‘Mecenat kulturalny Jana Konarskiego, 1447–1525’, in Rozprawy i sprawozdania Muzeum Narodowego w Krakowie, viii (Kraków, 1964), 133; Mazurkiewicz, pp. 6–9. 91 Corpus Iuris Polonici, iii. 579. 92 J. Czerniatowicz,‘Pocza˛tki grecystyki i walka o je˛zyk grecki w Polsce dobie Odrodzenia’, Studia i Materiały z dziejów nauki polskiej, ser. A, iii (Warsaw, 1959), 28–55. 93 D. Erasmi Roterodami Opus de Conscribendis Epistolis (Cracow, 1523), dedicatory letter. 94 Krzycki, Encomia Luteri,fo.5f. 95 Hosius, ‘Ad clarissimum antistitem Premisliensem operis authorem’, in Krzycki, De Afﬂictione, penultimate page. 96 Bylin´ski, Defensorium, fos. 21–22v.

Historical Research, vol. 87, no. 235 (February 2014) Copyright © 2013 Institute of Historical Research 60 Anti-Reformation polemic in the kingdom of Poland, 1520–36 asserting that traditional academic philosophy is not the foundation stone of Christian theology (an Erasmian position), and for Hegendorff’s ‘ridiculous’ failed attempt to express sola fide through a dialectic syllogism.97 The battle lines as constructed by Szamotulski are therefore between scholastic orthodoxy and humanist heresy. Polish printed polemic of the fifteen-twenties and thirties was thus debating, in part, whether there was a place within orthodoxy for Erasmus and other followers of the new philology. As such, the Latin church in Jagiellonian Poland as elsewhere was fighting not one, but two civil wars – between the ‘pious’ and the ‘new evangelists’, and another between scholastics and humanists.The battle lines in these two conflicts crossed over one another: as the polemics reveal, from the early fifteen-twenties the Polish church, along with the church elsewhere, was mired in a multi-dimensional religious and cultural struggle, laid bare on the pages of printed books.

What light can the anti-Reformation texts produced in Zygmunt I’s Polish monarchy shed, therefore, on the relationship between the church and the printing press in the two decades after 1517? Is there even a single story to be told about the relationship between these very different high clergymen and their various Cracow printers? Anti-Reformation polemic could and did exist without being put through a printing press – two important early Polish anti-Reformation texts, the polemical chronicle of the Prussian Dominican Simon Grunau (c.1529) and Bishop Johannes Dantiscus’s verse attack on the Lutheranism of his native Danzig (1535), both remained in manuscript, for example.98 The decision by the authors listed in Table 1 to print their polemic/s was not inevitable, but it is telling. In order to see what early sixteenth-century polemics tell us about the relationship between the church and the press, we need first to look at those books within the context of the Polish church’s longstanding interactions with printers, which predated the Reformation by over forty years. Polish bishops and dioceses had been enthusiastic commissioners and consumers of printed matter ever since Bishop Jan Rzeszowski of Cracow had ordered a run of a Missale Cracoviense from the Mainz workshop of Peter Schoeffer in 1484.By1502, at least eight ‘official’ editions of local liturgies had been printed for Polish dioceses (Gniezno, Cracow, Poznan´, Włocławek), placing Poland firmly at the heart of what was a European-wide episcopal printing trend.99 Late medieval Polish bishops also commissioned printed liturgical calendars and synod statutes.100 This was printing by the church, for the church – these printed products were explicitly provided for diocesan clergy, in order to enable them to perform their liturgical duties well, and maybe better than before. Here, Gutenberg’s invention was used to generate internal working documents for the church. In Poland, this use of the printing press continued apace throughout the early Reformation period. The Jagiellonian Library’s catalogue of sixteenth-century books shows that 153 religious titles were printed in Poland between 1500 and 1541; of these, over a third (fifty-five) were what we might term technical-professional texts for clergy and those in religious orders – missals, breviaries, diocesan statutes, religious rules, confessionals, books of

97 Szamotulski, Vincula (unnumbered pages). 98 Simon Grunau’s Preussische Chronik, ed. M. Perlbach (3 vols., Leipzig, 1875–96); Z. Nowak, ‘Antryreformacyjna elegia Dantyszka o zagładzie Gdan´ska’, Odrodzenie i Reformacja w Polsce, xvi (1971), 5–35. 99 N. Nowakowska, Church, State and Dynasty in Renaissance Poland: the Career of Cardinal Fryderyk Jagiellon (1468–1503) (Aldershot, 2007), pp. 75–81; Nowakowska, ‘From Strassburg to Trent’, app. 100 Nowakowska, Church, State and Dynasty,pp.168–9.

Copyright © 2013 Institute of Historical Research Historical Research, vol. 87, no. 235 (February 2014) Anti-Reformation polemic in the kingdom of Poland, 1520–36 61 clerical instruction and liturgical-astronomical calendars.101 Printing of this sort was so lucrative and in-demand, that alongside diocesan commissioned works, printers also produced technical texts for clergy on their own commercial initiative.102 The Polish church, therefore, had a longstanding and high-profile tradition of printing to meet institutional need; senior clergy speaking to lower clergy. Alongside this body of printed religious books, the workshops of Haller, Ungler, Wietor and Scharffenberg also produced a significant corpus of devotional works (thirty-six between 1500 and 1541) – hagiographies, religious poetry, meditations on the Passion – both in Latin (twenty editions) and in the Polish vernacular (sixteen editions).103 Devotional texts thus constituted the second largest slice of the religious book market in early sixteenth-century Poland; early Polish-language religious books, such as Z˙ ywot wszechmocnego syna boz˙ego, became a local publishing phenomenon, with workshops taking frantic legal action against one another to secure monopolies over these titles.104 Works such as the Z˙ ywot were certainly not ‘official’ church products, commissioned or sanctioned by the clerical hierarchy in the style of a Missale Cracoviense, and neither were they pitched exclusively at the clerical market. Elite urban women, for example, are thought to have constituted an important readership for vernacular devotional works in late medieval Europe.105 We have here a set of book-production-consumption relationships, relating to religious matters, which existed alongside (or even well outside) the institutional church. The anti-Reformation polemics authored in Jagiellonian Poland, and printed chiefly in Cracow from 1520 to 1536, do not, significantly, fit neatly within either of these existing segments of the local religious book market. None of the polemics (with the exception of Jan Konarski’s 1520 episcopal letter glossing Exsurge Domine, the proto-polemic) carried a bishop’s mandate letter, or a statement in the colophon by the prelate confirming that he had ordered production of the work – that is, the distinctive features developed and established in the fifteenth century clearly to identify a breviary, missal or clerical manual as a sanctioned diocesan product. Nor do any of the Polish polemics conform to the model of the printed devotional book – they contain doctrinal argument, rather than hagiographies, prayers and such like, and, of course, none of them was issued in the vernacular. They do, however, have telling areas of overlap with both these religious book sub-markets in early sixteenth-century Cracow. On the one hand, many of these polemics positioned themselves as official diocesan products, albeit implicitly (and sometimes illicitly). Szamotulski’s Anacephaleosis (1535), for example, claimed the status of a diocesan publication – both through the author’s assertion that he had produced the text ‘ex officio’ as archdeacon of Poznan´, and through the inclusion on the title page of a woodcut showing the arms of the reigning bishop, Jan Latalski. (We know this was not done with Latalski’s permission, because he later denounced both the polemic and its author in a furious tirade before the Poznan´

101 Calculated from the Katalog poloników, vols. i–ii. 102 Nowakowska, ‘From Strassburg to Trent’, p. 19. 103 Calculated from the Katalog poloników, vols. i–ii. 104 Z˙ ywot wszechmocnego syna boz˙ego Pana Jezu Chrysta (Cracow, 1522); Kawecka-Grzycowa, p. 332.For early Polish vernacular devotional printing, see T. Ulewicz, Ws´ród impresorów krakowskich doby Renesansu (Cracow, 1977), pp. 66–89. 105 See, e.g., E. A. Robertson, Early English Devotional Prose and the Female Audience (Knoxville, Tenn., 1990) and The Voice of Silence: Women’s Literacy in a Men’s Church, ed. T. de Hemptinne and M. E. Góngora (Turnhout, 2004).

Historical Research, vol. 87, no. 235 (February 2014) Copyright © 2013 Institute of Historical Research 62 Anti-Reformation polemic in the kingdom of Poland, 1520–36 cathedral chapter.)106 Similarly, letters printed with Tiedemann Giese’s Anthelogikon (1525) presented the work as having been solicited and endorsed by his fellow Ermland canons, Nicholas Copernicus and Felix Ricus, creating the impression that the governing clergy of this prince-bishopric had approved the project.107 The polemics of Andrzej Krzycki, bishop of Przemys´l, were indisputably a direct episcopal product, albeit one which contained no explicit canonical instructions for his spiritual subordinates, and made no reference to his own diocese.The Polish polemics, therefore, were not ‘official’ diocesan publications in the late medieval tradition, but they were written by high clergy, writing precisely as high clergy, speaking for and on behalf of the local hierarchy of the Latin church. They therefore both were, and were not, ‘official’ diocesan publications. There are, equally, overlaps between polemics and devotional printed books. These are overlaps of audience rather than content.Works such as the Z˙ ywot were produced for an audience of the devout, which included both clergy and laity.108 Polish anti-Reformation polemics represent a shift towards this market, because they are, significantly, the first publications in which we find senior figures in the Polish clerical hierarchy using printing to address (in Latin), on religious subjects, an audience which did not consist exclusively of fellow clergy.109 Dobergast, his patron Bishop Tomicki and Archdeacon Szamutolski apparently had no qualms whatsoever about this, openly addressing themselves on doctrinal issues in print to students. Szamotulski, moreover, explicitly welcomed the possibilities which the press provided – in the preface to his 1531 indulgences sermon, he wrote that he was having it printed so that the reader, as well as the listener, could have a chance of taking his spiritual message to heart. Here, printing polemic is presented as a pastoral act, to enable the internalization of a sermon by one’s (educated) congregation, or as a way of reaching an extra-ecclesiastical congregation.110 Walenty Wróbel too cheerfully wrote that he wished to make his anti-heretical ideas public – ‘in publicum ederem’ – and that he had therefore given the text to a printer.111 Neither of these two Poznan´ polemicists specifies a clerical audience in these comments; their words imply (and in Szamotulski’s case, strongly imply) a broader audience or flock.This willingness to air doctrinal arguments in print to an educated, partially lay readership was common to both the humanist and anti-humanist camp; the most theologically conservative of these polemicists, Grzegorz Szamotulski, was among the most prolific and vocally enthusiastic proponents of printed polemic for educated laity as an anti-heretical tool. These Polish examples sit uncomfortably alongside a strand of scholarship on polemic which has long claimed that the old church hierarchy was fundamentally ill at ease with the idea of using print to air doctrinal controversies, and was in particular deeply afraid of addressing the laity on such subjects.112 In Poland, printed anti-Reformation polemic is significant because it represents a crucial moment of transition in the church’s relationship with the press – a shift

106 Poznan´, Archiwum Archidiecezjalne w Poznaniu, MS. CP 37 (acta capituli), fo. 65f, June 1535. 107 Giese, Anthelogikon, prefatory letters. Teresa Borawska has suggested that the bishop of Cracow, Piotr Tomicki, played a part in organizing the semi-ofﬁcial printing of Giese’s work (see Borawska, p. 314). 108 See, e.g., E. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars:Traditional Religion in England c.1400–c.1580 (1992), pp. 77–83. 109 The only precedent was Sacranus’s Elucidarius, which was signiﬁcantly also a polemic. 110 Szamotulski, Sermo,fo.1v. 111 Wróbel, Propugnaculum, dedicatory letter. 112 Edwards, ‘Catholic controversial literature’, p. 197 and Printing, Propaganda,pp.57–8; Bagchi, ‘Luther’s Catholic opponents’, p. 99.

Copyright © 2013 Institute of Historical Research Historical Research, vol. 87, no. 235 (February 2014) Anti-Reformation polemic in the kingdom of Poland, 1520–36 63 from (usually diocesan-sponsored) printing exclusively for clergy, to semi-official ecclesiastical printing for an audience which included a Latin-literate lay elite.As such, with anti-Lutheran polemic, Polish clerical authors were entering something like an early sixteenth-century printed, or public, sphere.113 Much has been claimed for the noisy machine of the printing press – more books in circulation, by implication creating more readers (Febvre and Martin), textual standardization (Eisenstein), a new economics of book production whereby big books (slow return) and pamphlets (fast return) had to be alternated by workshops (Halasz), and a shift from bespoke, individually commissioned hand-copied books to speculative production for an unknown, guessed-at readership (Pettegree).114 In the case of anti-Reformation polemic, however, a further argument made by Alexandra Halasz is particularly relevant: she has written that the significance of print also lay in its ability to ‘[disseminate and mediate] discourse independent of the sites and practices associated with and sanctioned by the university, Crown and Church’.115 The proper, traditional locus for medieval anti-heretical discourse was the sermon, the theology lecture or the academic disputation. By the time that Luther burst upon the scene, however, printing had opened up a new ‘discourse space’ on the pages of the printed religious book, a plane which was, vitally, not jurisdictionally or pastorally part of the church. This was a printed sphere in which Polish high clergy participated with their polemics but which, crucially, they did not control – it was ultimately extra-ecclesiastical. This development, and thus the early Polish polemics themselves, had major implications. A cleric such as Archdeacon Szamotulski preaching against the Reformation in a pulpit, in a consecrated church, in the context of a sung Mass, did so on the church’s own territory, operating within its hierarchy and traditional practices – it was not clear, however, what the status of those same anti-Lutheran words was once they were encountered in a Cracow bookshop, lying about alongside other books, competing for attention, in a physical marketplace of ideas. As such, we might say that printed polemics not only occupied a new ‘discursive space’, but also an early modern virtual space, which was both fruitfully and dangerously ambiguous. By airing theological ideas in this virtual space, Polish polemicists were taking doctrinal debate well beyond the traditional confines of the medieval theology faculty.This was new – the anti-Hussite sermons and treatises produced by Cracow theologians a century earlier had, as hand-copied texts, circulated in limited numbers and only within clerical and academic circles.116 If a broadening out of theological discussion was itself one of

113 J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. T. Burger (Cambridge, 1989). Habermas himself would not apply his celebrated concept of a ‘public sphere’ to the early Reformation controversy: for him, a real public had by deﬁnition to be free from domination, capable of discussing political affairs in an autonomous space, and possibly constitute a challenge to government. 114 L. Febvre and H.-J. Martin, The Coming of the Book: the Impact of Printing, 1450–1800, ed. G. Nowell-Smith and D. Wootton, trans. D. Gerard (1976), pp. 248–9; E. L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe (2 vols., Cambridge, 1979); A. Halasz, The Marketplace of Print: Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 15–16; A. Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance (New Haven, Conn., 2010), p. 53. 115 Halasz, p. 4. 116 Rechowicz found that these anti-Hussite works typically survive in just one copy, bequeathed by their authors to the university library (Rechowicz, Dzieje teologii,i.133–41). On the similarly narrow,chieﬂy Carmelite circulation of Netter’s Doctrinale, see M. Harvey, ‘The diffusion of the Doctrinale of Thomas Netter in the 15th and 16th centuries’, in Intellectual Life in the Middle Ages: Essays Presented to Margaret Gibson, ed. L. Smith and B. Ward (1992), pp. 281–94,atpp.282–3.

Historical Research, vol. 87, no. 235 (February 2014) Copyright © 2013 Institute of Historical Research 64 Anti-Reformation polemic in the kingdom of Poland, 1520–36 the causes of the Reformation, by projecting their anti-heresy arguments beyond the church, via the printing press, the Polish polemicists of the fifteen-twenties and thirties were both a testament to this trend, and also further encouraging it. Historians will continue to argue over whether the ‘Catholic’ clerical hierarchy in the early sixteenth century was pulled into this vortex of printed, ‘public’ religious argumentation by forces beyond its control, or whether it willingly stepped into it. The evidence from Jagiellonian Poland suggests that a cross-section of high clergy – while writing solely in Latin – took their anti-Lutheran ideas into the wider book market knowingly and even enthusiastically.As such, their works marked an important stepping stone from a fifteenth-century tradition of church printing emphatically for clergy, and towards a Counter Reformation world, where confessions and catechisms were printed specifically for the edification and salvation of the layperson. Perhaps the most famous of these, the Confessio Fidei Catholicae Christianae (1555), would be composed by a Polish clergyman – by the Tridentine Bishop Stanisław Hozjusz, one-time protégé of Andrzej Krzycki, who as an aspiring young humanist author had cut his teeth composing poems for the frontispieces of Cracow anti-Reformation polemic.117 The old, Latin church did not have a single, general relationship with the printing press, any more than it spoke with one theological voice in the fifteen-twenties – there were local contexts, local diocesan traditions and book markets, but above all a steady process of evolution, adaptation and experimentation by senior clergy, as they grappled over time with the relationship between the printed sphere, doctrine and the church.

117 Stanisław Hosius (Hozjusz), Confessio Fidei Catholicae Christianae (Cracow, 1553).