Maciej Ptaszynski: The Reformation in Poland and the Legacy of Erasmus of Rotterdam

Maciej Ptaszynski: The Reformation in Poland and the Legacy of Erasmus of Rotterdam. Brill 2026. ISBN: 978-90-04-77004-1

OA: https://brill.com/display/title/75421?contents=toc-138058

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 Drawing on largely unpublished manuscript correspondence from archives across Europe, Ptaszyński shows how Erasmus’s legacy of peace actively shaped royal policy and elite culture.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.

Maciej Ptaszyński, Ph.D. (2007), Professor of History at the University of Warsaw. He specializes in the Reformation and political culture. His most recent book is Sztuka kompromisu O pierwszej wolnej elekcji i konfederacji warszawskiej(The Art of Compromise. On the first free election in Poland and the Warsaw Confederation),(2025).