High Clergy and Printers: Antireformation Polemic in The
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bs_bs_banner 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. Copyright © 2013 Institute of Historical Research Historical Research, vol. 87, no. 235 (February 2014) Anti-Reformation polemic in the kingdom of Poland, 1520–36 45 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