Reformation in Poland and the Legacy of Erasmus of Rotterdam

The Polish Reformation avoided the bloody religious wars that devastated the rest of Europe. In The Reformation in Poland and the Legacy of Erasmus of Rotterdam, Maciej Ptaszyński explains the reason: a powerful intellectual network of Polish Erasmians. Drawing on largely unpublished manuscript correspondence from archives across Europe, Ptaszyński shows how Erasmus’s legacy of peace actively shaped royal policy and elite culture. Along the way, the reader is offered the most extensive overview of the Polish Reformation produced to date, reconstructed from Renaissance Poland’s vibrant world of clandestine letters, subversive carnival parodies, and court intrigues. Ptaszyński rethinks the boundaries between humanism and the Reformation, to show how a unique generation of humanist politicians prevented religious strife from creating martyrs.