History

Stosunki miêdzy ludnoci¹ ¿ydowsk¹ a duchowieñstwem katolickim to temat posiadaj¹cy ju¿ rozleg³¹ literaturê. Bogactwo ilociowe nie zawsze idzie jednak w parze z wszechstronnoci¹ ujêcia z³o¿onych prze-cie¿ zagadnieñ. Najbardziej eksponowane z nich s¹ bez w¹tpienia konflikty na tle wyznaniowym. Jest to zrozumia³e, bowiem w³anie z pozycji odrêbnoci i wy¿szoci religijnej strona katolicka wystêpowa³a najczêciej przeciw wyznawcom starego zakonu. Ataki takie by³y te¿ najbardziej brzemienne w skutkach. Nie wy³¹cznie do nich sprowadza³y siê jednak wzajemne relacje. Dominacja kwestii wyznaniowych jest równie¿ po-chodn¹ marginalnego na ogó³ traktowania w ród³ach innych aspektów koegzystencji duchowieñstwa katolickiego i mozaistów. Przyjmowanie za ród³ami takich proporcji, jako reprezentatywnych dla istniej¹cych niegdy wzajemnych stosunków, by³oby w opinii pisz¹cego te s³owa zniekszta³conym i niepe³nym odbiciem istniej¹cej niegdy rzeczywistoci.

“Funeral Labours” of the Sandomierz Franciscans-the Reformati in Early Modern Times
Summary
The article presents burials of those who chose their graves at the churchyard or in the vaults of the Sandomierz Franciscans’ church. The friary’s chronicle, which includes registers of the dead as well as burial descriptions, forms the basis for this study. The friars settled down in Sandomierz, the centre of a Little Poland palatinate, in 1672. By 1834, 395 burials were recorded, but the documentation is incomplete and the guestimate for undocumented interments there can be as high as two hundred. The largest number of burials that is eighty two were noted in 1731-1740, and the lowest data are the twenty nine interments in the years 1771-1780. It seems that the growing numbers did not result from possible natural calamities, but rather they reflect the changing popularity of the friars with the then social strata. These were first of all the nobility and the gentry (67% of the buried), local burghers (25%) and the diocesan clergy. One's place in the social hierarchy was reflected with the place they took in the church in their lifetime and after demise.
Magnates and representatives of the upper classes of the gentry often commemorated their dead twice. A corpse was buried soon after one’s death, which was named depositio privata, sepultura, but such a private funeral was followed by the public celebration in a few weeks. This time the farewell (funus), which could last even a week, attracted a crowd of friends and relatives. The showy liturgy performed in the lavishly decorated interiors commu-nicated both the eschatological and social teachings. It was an occasion to stress the im-portance of a family in its neighborhood and social milieu, because the achievements of the dead and their relatives were exposed in numerous sermons. Even not so well-to-do gentry and townsfolk families aspired to at least a two-day funeral.
As a rule, the Franciscans were extraordinarily materially supported on such occasions, but they never declined from help even for the poorest.

Jan Długosz and the so-called Gentry’s Anticlericalism in Seventeenth-century Poland
The paper discusses the role of the Liber beneficiorum ecclesiae Cracoviensis by Jan Długosz (ca. 1470-80) in the seventeenth-century debates over ecclesiastical incomes, and especially tithes were a valuable resource. The Liber beneficiorum or Regestrum ecclesiae Cracoviensis was a legal basis of prime importance for the clergy to demand their economic rights; hence the credibility of the census was undermined by the gentry, but also by some high-rank clerics who came from that class and sympathized with its economic interests. The sheaf (or field collected) tithe (decima manipularis) and the fixed monetary tithe (decima pecunialis) predominated, although the latter was legal only when it had been confirmed by the ordinary. This regulation followed the century-old tradition of the Church, which was always in favour of the sheaf tithe. The 1635 Polish Diet’s act, which encouraged both the Church and the gentry to change sheaves for money, met the expectations of the latter stratum.

The article discusses how the authors of sixteenth-century Polish Catholic and Evangelical catechisms perceived and analysed the notion of " the Church ". Following the Tridentine programme, the Catholic authors present their Church as unified under the Pope's authority and the only inheritor of the works of the Apostles. The veracity of its teaching is testified to with God's unnatural interventions – miracles. Protestant theologians teach about " the visible and outward Church " , which exists whenever the pure Word of God is preached and where sacraments are administered in accordance with the Holy Writ. Alongside the Visible Church, there exists " the invisible and inward Church " that unites all those following Christ, who is the one and only head of the Church.

The article discusses three registers of funeral expenditures that were presented to the urban authorities of Cracow in the 1650s. Unlike last wills and testaments, 16th-17th-century sources documenting the costs of burial and other posthumous expenses are sparsely extant in Poland. The three registers discussed here show the funeral customs of the lower strata of Cracow population, which increases their informative value.

The paper discusses the documentation left by rev. Albert Chotelski (1556-1616), a canon of Wiślica chapter and rector at the nearby parish of Dobrowoda in the diocese of Cracow). Chotelski was born to a peasant family in the district of Wiślica and educated in an intellectual milieu of the capital. In 1598, he was appointed as the historiographer of his Chapter by Cardinal Jerzy Radziwiłł. The chronicle he penned shows Wiślica collegiate Church and its clergy in a wide context of the Polish and universal Church. He also compiled copies of documents confirming the incomes of Dobrowoda church’s benefice and made a detailed inventory of the manor. He supplemented this collection with his poems in Polish and in Latin. They describe his priestly efforts, criticize the ways in which the cure-of-souls was widely neglected those days, and, last but not least, show the destruction caused by the Sandomierz rebellion in 1606.

Stanisław Murmelius began his career as a typographer in Cracow in the 1540s. What remains an open question, however, is his putative familial relation to the Dutch scholar and lexicographer Jan from Roermond. In 1558, Mikołaj “The Black” Radziwiłł entrusted him with the management of the printing house at Brest-Litovsk. Murmelius stayed there to 1565, and it is possible that he took part in the preparations of the famous first Polish edition of the Protestant Bible.
In 1570, Murmelius was imprisoned in Cracow for the inability to pay
off a debt he had incurred five years previously with the Lublin townsman
Jakub Konopnica. In the same year, he left prison on a pledge of the famous Cracow printer and bookseller Mikołaj Szarfenberger. In 1571, the Cracow justice ordered what we can interpret as the whole Muremelius’ book collection or its fragment to be surveyed and registered, and the books were to be handed over to Konopnica as discharge of the debt. Murmelius was registered once more as an impressor de Cracovia in 1572, even though he probably never owned a printing house.
The inventory of his book collection includes 109 titles, often in more
than one copy. This assortment indicates its owner’s interest in Protestant literature. Thirty one authors represent various Lutheran denominations (43.66 per cent), sixteen (22.53 per cent) are theologians of the Evangelical Reformed Community; one was Antitrinitarian (1.41 per cent). There were also books of nine Catholic authors (12.68 per cent), however, with one exception, they were not sixteenth-century contestants of the Reformation. Their books were read in search for those elements of tradition to which the Reformers were referring. Moreover, fourteen authors (19.72 per cent) cannot be identified or elude classification.

The importance of the Scottish diaspora in Old Polish society
The turn of the 1980s can be regarded as an important temporal caesura in investigating the Scottish diaspora in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. This is when publications presenting their immigration in a broader social context first appeared, and they referred to primary and secondary sources published in Poland and Scotland. In comparison with other European countries, the part of the diaspora that had settled down in Poland was characterized by the dominance of merchants over soldiers, although the cases of Scots who shifted from one occupation to the other were not unknown. The studies published by Peter Paul Bajer in 2012 finally disconfirmed the prior speculations putting the number of the immigrants at 30,000. The number did not exceed 7,000, in fact, which constituted not more than 0.07% of the entire population of the Polish-Lithuanian state. Likewise, the claims that Scots dominated stallholding trade did not find any confirmation in the customs books of the late 16th and early 17th century. Scots were visible, but an economically insignificant minority in the urbanised population of early modern Poland-Lithuania.
The assimilation of the Scottish arrivals in the towns of the Polish Crown depended on the place of their settlement and their belonging to either Catholic or Evangelical denominations. Despite notable activity of some Scottish immigrants in the life of the local Church, it would be an overstatement to claim that as a rule the financial support they offered to their co-believers was crucial. Nevertheless, it could have been significant at times.
The knowledge of the customs and family relations of the Scottish settlers is broadened by two epithalamia that have been preserved. One of them, written in Lvov between 1637 and 1653, documents the wedding of Regina Rottendorf and Alexander Reyd as well as the expectations of those closest to the newlyweds. A similar commemorative print, which marked the wedding of Francis Gordon of Bydant coat of arms and Margaret Portius, reveals the family’s pride in John Gordon, who, having been in service with the Emperor had been involved in the killing of Albrecht von Wallenstein. Among the bride’s relatives, the greatest importance was attached to the royal servitor Robert Portius of Lanxeth, due to his merits to the town of Krosno.
Affluent Scottish merchants usually easily found their place in the communities that were ready to accept them. Their influence on the local life might have been temporarily quite significant as they held municipal ranks albeit infrequently. Nevertheless, their economic and cultural impact on Polish-Lithuanian society was not long lasting nor of a prime importance.

Marital Problems in the Diocese of Cracow: Three Court Cases from the Mid-seventeenth Century
Summary
The article discusses three marital cases from the Cracow diocese that were heard by the Ordinary, bishop Piotr Gembicki (1642-1657). The requests are as follows: 1. acceptance of the consent given by the Official of the Radom archdeaconry for the separation of a married couple of the gentry so that the husband could be ordained as a Presbyter and the wife could enter a local nunnery; 2. consent for two townspeople, a Catholic fiancée and a Scottish Calvinist fiancé, to enter into marriage in a private home with disregard of the banns, with the permission based solely upon the burgher’s promise to convert; 3. instruction to investigate a husband’s request to divorce his wife because she deliberately concealed the fact that she had never been christened. It is highly probable that she was a member of the Polish Brethren, and these followers of Fausto Paolo Sozzini reject baptism of both children and adults.
These problems are not typical of the numerous litigant marital cases that were frequently debated at the ecclesiastical courts of the day. Nevertheless, they could not have been unique either because they were recorded in a formulary codex of the Ordinary’s Chancellery. The originals of the documents are not extant, and their copies were not inserted into the Chancellery’s inscription books. No similar cases were included into the later formulary codices of that office that were compiled from the late seventeenth century onwards. The fact that the discussed cases were left out there as not important any longer allows one to assume that this kind of clerical auxiliary reference provides reliable information of the importance and frequency of the wide range of cases investigated at ecclesiastical courts during the early modern ages.

So, Why Should One Weed? Wacław Potocki about Sermonizing of His Times
Wacław Potocki (1621-1696) was the most prolific and outstanding poet of Baroque Poland. Born to a gentry Socinian family, in 1663 he chose conversion to Catholicism facing legal oppression and the growing religious intolerance in the aftermath of the Second Northern War (1655-1660). The plethora of his minor poetical works show people of all the social strata in various everyday situations. Hence, his witty comments are a treasure trove of information about the realities he faced and the world he lived in. As this aspect of his voluminous heritage has not been sufficiently explored yet, in my chapter I discuss Potocki’s observations concerning sermonizing as part of the cure of souls in his parish and other rural parishes. Contrary to the prevailing opinion among historians that, as a rule, those gathered at church passively listened to the preachers’ words, the poet shows that people, regardless of their social standing, lively reacted to the sermon, which at times turned into a dialogue between the local laity and their pastor. A parish community could express their expectations concerning the substance of teaching and the way it was delivered. Thus, it happened that church discipline and practice was shaped as a process of balancing the potentials of the minister and his flock.

Baptism as Initiation to the Life in the Church and Parental Responsibility for Religious Education of Children in Light of Polish Catechetical and Liturgical Manuals of the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century
The main sources representative of the Catholic doctrine are the catechism of Benedykt Herbest, published in 1566 and his treatise on the significance and on the rite of baptism (1567). Catechisms by Paweł Gilowski (1579), Stanisław Sudrowiusz (1581) and Krzysztof Kraiński (1596) reliably explain the Reformed understanding of the sacrament.
This comparative analysis explicitly shows that the communal dimension of the sacrament of baptism was not the same in the Evangelical communion and in the Catholic church in Poland. According to the doctrine of the Catholic church, it was a ceremony enjoyed almost exclusively in the family circle. The Polish Reformed Evangelicals, on the other hand, followed John Calvin in showing the collective and ecclesiastical aspect of that sacrament, which could be fulfilled and bring benefits only in the community of the Church.

The Soldier’s Wellness and Illness during the Second Northern War as Presented in the Diary of Patrick Gordon of Auchleuchries

The Scots Patrick Gordon was born in 1635 to an impoverished noble family in Aberdeenshire. In 1651, he arrived in Royal Prussia, and in 1655 he was recruited under the standard of the Kingdom of Sweden. During the Second Northern War, he travelled across the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth with the Swedish army and then with Polish troops. Gordon documented his adventures in the Diary, which is an extraordinarily rich narrative source relating to the history of early modern central Europe.
A series of natural disasters struck around that region in the 1650s, and bubonic plague was the most disastrous of them. Gordon shows, how he and his companions tried to avoid the pestilence and what kind of treatment was applied to the sick. The soldiers consulted town physicians whenever it was possible. Most often, however, they resorted to the widespread and easily accessible therapies, and drinking urine was one of them. Moreover, the Diary informs about the sanitary conditions in the town prisons in Nowy Sącz, southern Poland, and in Danzig (Gdańsk), where Gordon was jailed for a few months.

People of the Corpus Christi Parish in Kazimierz, Cracow, According to the Poll-Tax Register of 1662: Family and Homestead
The town of Kazimierz, a Cracow municipality, suffered heavy damage during the Second Northern War. The exceptionally detailed poll-tax register was carried out in May and June of 1662 there, although it reflects the demographic situation only in the central part of the town. The census for the suburbs and for the Jewish section of Kazimierz is not extant or the tax was not collected in the latter part of the town at all. 
The global number of taxpayers was 1516, the average number of individuals per hearth was 2.7 persons, and 78.1% of households were three-person at maximum. 21.5% households were those of single, childless persons. It comes as no surprise that the nuclear family prevailed. The relatively high percentage of childless hearths (69.8%, and there were 82.0% of such nuclear families) results to some, unverifiable extent from the Diet’s directive that exempted from taxation all those younger than ten years of age. Another possible explanation is the common practice of sending young children to work as servants.
Servants were listed in 32.0% of all the homesteads, and this rate is lower than the data known for other urbanised communities of seventeenth-century Poland. Servants constituted 22.8% of all the registered parishioners and women numerically prevailed (57.8%).
Although much of the house destruction for Cracow in the years 1655-1657 was documented in Kazimierz, the analysed register denies the assumption that the Swedish Deluge depopulated that town as much as 75% of its pre-war inhabitants. One cannot exclude a significant influx of new settlers from the countryside to the desolate town between 1657 and 1662, however at the moment it is only a hypothesis.

The Cracow Bishop Martin Szyszkowski and Consequences of the 1620s Pestilence

The chapter discusses some social and legal consequences the survivors of the 1620s pestilence in Little Poland had to face in the aftermath of that natural disaster. The plague in that part of Poland before 1650s is poorly documented. Only a limited number of parish and town records of that period are extant, and their authors gave short shrift to the plague as a rule. Registers of deaths were not systematically continued in Poland before the mid-17 century. Hence, the Cracow bishops’ court records are a unique source basis that sheds light on post-plague life, and the documentation of Bishop Martin Szyszkowski (1617-1630) is especially informative.
The bishop confirmed his subjects’ testaments if their legal validity was questioned, which was in compliance with the Magdeburg Code of laws. On the basis of Canon Law, he approved grants for Church institutions. The controversial cases discussed in this chapter were taken to court mostly by lay inheritors and only by a few pastors. The bishop court’s legal advisor (instigator curiæ) was always active both as public attorney and prosecutor.
In the time of the looming threat, townspeople sought refuge in neighbouring villages having deposited their valuables at the local church and/or at the town hall. The shelter in a nearby vicinity was an illusive protection. Refugees were visited there by relatives who wanted to settle family matters. As always, any contacts with the infected settlements were punished severely, but these restrictions were not rigorously observed. Thence, the bishop confiscated the property of his disobedient subjects, and both them and their families were expelled from the episcopal demesne. Infected and deserted houses were plundered by burglars who represented various social strata, including the gentry. 
Despite all the limitations and hardships, refugees, bound by law and custom, always remembered about testamentary instructions and dispositions. The last wills and testaments that were shown to the bishop had always been drawn up in the presence of witnesses, and after the pestilence ceased, the documents were copied in town councils’ records (acta scabinalia or acta advocatalia). At court, the burghers presented either originals or copies that had been sealed by the town council. 
Every time when a testator bequeathed their real estate to his or her relatives who lived in a domain of another lord, the bishop’s legal advisor demanded the disposal be regarded invalid from its very beginning. The bishop followed those suggestions as a rule, which seems contrary to the common legal practice in that epoch. This could have been motivated, however, by the widespread economic conflicts between the gentry and the Church, whose institutions were banned from inheriting real estates in private towns. The bishop also limited hereditary succession invoking “the right of the first claim” (ius propinquitatis, ius proximitatis), which was commonly regarded as unconstrained. Moreover, he always decided to the advantage of Church institutions, especially of the parish clergy. Bp. Szyszkowski allowed the donators to support ecclesiastical institutions other than the local parish church only when the expectations of its rector had been satisfied. This policy enabled the parish to increase its incomes significantly in the aftermath, and the bishop encouraged clergy to secure investments with no delay. The report ad limina Apostolorum Szyszkowski sent in 1625 leaves no doubt that he was aware of the severe poverty in his diocese, which was due to the plague and the ongoing war with Turkey.
The bishop was a benefactor the reformed Franciscans (Fratres Minores de Observantia) and he supported the cult of the suffering Christ the Order popularised. In his book dedicated to the Brotherhood of Compassion, Szyszkowski argued to always remember “the ultimate things”. Following the hoary tradition, he interpreted natural calamities as the Lord’s punishment for sinful life, and especially for the toleration of heresies. Martin Szyszkowski, who accomplished the long-lasting process of the implementation of the Tridentine reforms into Cracow diocese, taught about man’s responsibilities towards God, the Church and the diocesan pastor in a very traditional way.

A Model of Christian Behaviour in the Light of Two Polemical Pamphlets from the Mid-Sixteenth Century
Summary
The chapter examines the prints Rozmowa nowa niektorego pielgrzyma z gospodarzem (A New Discourse Betwixt a Pilgrim and the Innkeeper) (1549) and Rozmowy Polskie (Polish Debates) (1553). These anti-Lutheran pamphlets, the oldest printed texts of this kind in Polish, prove that in the wider consciousness there were rather few elements of the new religious doctrine. The path a Christian should follow on their way to salvation is the main controversy under discussion. Those declaratively anti-Lutheran dialogues propagate Christocentric religiosity. Although the cult of Mary, the intercession of the saints and the salvific importance of good deeds are not particularly recommended, they are not explicitly rejected either. Considering that these works were created in times when spreading Lutheranism was illegal under Polish law, the assessment of the authors’ intentions must remain an open issue. Religious polemics as reflected in the discussed sources is part of the long-lasting debate on the reform of the Church.

CRAFTSMEN IN THE TOWN OF PIŃCZÓW IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
The private town of Pińczów, ca. 80 kilometres north of Cracow,  was a leading centre of the Reformation in Lesser Poland from 1550 to the late 1580s. The new owners, the Myszkowskis, who reintroduced Catholicism, turned the town and the neighbouring castle into a thriving economic hub and a noble residence, one of the most populous in the province. The margrave invited craftsmen of various nationalities, and Italian sculptors seem to have been the most numerous group. The other newcomers were merchants and artisans, including goldsmiths, from Italy, France, Scotland and Germany. The extant sources shed more light on Benedict Briott, the bell-founder who hailed from Lorraine and arrived in Pińczów in 1643 or 1644. Earlier, he had travelled over the central German lands and Bohemia. By 1655, Pińczów was his main place of residence. In those years, he was active mainly in Lesser Poland, but also in Greater Poland and Brandenburg. His wife, Katherine, died in Pińczów in 1660, and it is unclear whether their daughter Marianne survived pestilence. Between 1658 and 1668, he founded bells for churches in Greater Poland, Moravia, Bohemia and Silesia. In 1671, he was noted as a royal servitor in Warsaw.

De mortuis nil nisi vere. The Chalmers, Cracow Townspeople and Evangelicals in the Eyes of Rev. Daniel Kałay
On 21 October, 1664 Rev. Daniel Kałay, the minister of the Reformed-Evangelical congregation at Wiatowice near Cracow, had a funeral sermon there dedicated to late Elizabeth Chalmer, nee Horam. Elizabeth and her husband James, a merchant, belonged to the community of Cracow Scots. Kałay, who was born to parents of Hungarian and Scottish descent, must have known the Chalmers well. Ca. 1648-50, he was the preceptor of their son James, born in 1642, and he dedicated the print version of the sermon not to the father and the husband, but to the son. Although we know from other sources that the Chalmers supported themselves in everyday life, nevertheless the analysed oration is not free from slightly critical digs at the husband.
The sermon, which was published in 1666, was arranged in accordance with the rhetoric rules, following the practice typical of Polish evangelicals. However, the minister strongly emphasises the importance of good works in salvation and his conviction that Elizabeth has already earned that grace. This seems controversial with respect to the mainstream Reformed tradition of the day.