10 - Poland
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 December 2009
Summary
The first modern history of the Polish Reformation appeared in English in 1838, but the author of this comprehensive two-volume work was a Polish historian, Walerian Krasinski (1795-1855), who had emigrated to England. In modern accounts of the history of Protestantism, the Reformation in Poland hardly merits more than a few pages. One reason for this neglect is the relatively small numbers of adherents to the Reformation in Poland and in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which was united with Poland at that time. It was a ‘Reformation episode’, as the latest history of the Polish Reformation by Waclaw Urban calls it, rather than a significant epoch in our history.
By contrast with Germany, France or England, where the Reformation movement developed among people speaking the same language, the vast Polish-Lithuanian state, finally united in Lublin in 1569, had a multilingual population. The Poles made up about 40 per cent of the inhabitants, and only some of them were ethnically conscious; their only bond seemed to be a common dynasty. While it was the Reformation that brought about a religious split in most of the Catholic states of Western Europe, in Poland and Lithuania each ethnic group had its own specific creed before the Reformation: the Poles had Catholicism, the Ruthenians (ancestors of today's Ukrainians and Byelorussians) adhered to the Orthodox Church and the Jews to Judaism, while there were also adherents of Islam, the Tartars.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Reformation in National Context , pp. 168 - 180Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994
- 2
- Cited by