Sytuacja wyznaniowa rodu Sienieńskich i jej wpływ na losy Rakowa po 1638 roku
The Religious Dynamics of the Sienieński Family and Its Effect on the Town of Raków after 1638

Summary/Abstract: The article discusses important genealogical and confessional data regarding the Sienieński family, the owners of Raków and patrons of the Church of the Polish Brethren. The research is based on Roman Catholic Cracow Diocese Church records, extant Raków municipal documents and other primary and secondary documents. The article traces the Sienieński family fortunes following the suppression of Raków in 1638 as a Socinian centre. By placing the underage male family members with Catholic relatives, the Polish monarch achieved their complete conversion within a decade. However, some women of the Sienieński family stayed faithful to their unitarian faith even after the denomination was officially proscribed in 1658. These changing religious family dynamics allow us also to explain the fate of the Polish Brethren church edifice at Raków post-1638 and the circumstances of the building of the Roman Catholic edifice. The family religious dynamics and the fate of the old Socinian church building help to explain the endurance of Protestants at Raków until the early eighteenth century. Finally, based on the fate of the Sienieński family, the article calls for a reappraisal of the circumstances of conversion to Catholicism in the seventeenth-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, universally seen as peaceful and voluntary, and which the Sienieński family and Raków cases call into question.

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