Echoes of the 1580 Jesuit Mission to England in Early Modern Poland
Echoes of the 1580 Jesuit Mission to England in Early Modern Poland

Summary/Abstract: The Polish version of the article was published in Roczniki Humanistyczne 61 (2013), issue 2. The article presents Polish reactions to the famous Jesuit mission in England of 1580, and thus also the beginnings of the formation of the worship of St Edmund Campion in Poland. They are connected with the publication in Kraków (1583) of a translation of Robert Persons’ account entitled De persecutione Anglicana, but also with the position that the history of Campion’s mission took in the work of Piotr Skarga SJ. The Polish writer, showing a lively interest in what was going on with English Catholics and inspiring political interventions in support of Jesuits imprisoned in England (including his subordinate, the Vilnius professor James Bosgrave), in subsequent editions of his very popular hagiographic collection Żywoty świętych [The Lives of Saints] presented Przydatek […] o świętych męczennikach [A Supplement […] on Saint Martyrs] which was modified several times, and in it a paragraph titled O męczennikach w Anglijej [On Martyrs in England]. Its most basic part consisted of—starting with the 1585 edition—the story of St Edmund Campion, St Ralph Sherwin and Alexander Briant’s mission and martyrdom, which was a free adaptation of the narration contained in Concertatio Ecclesiae Catholicae in Anglia by John Fenn and John Gibson (1583). Skarga’s interest in the figure of Campion was also reflected in the Polish translation of Rationes decem (1583) that he made at the request of King Stephen Báthory. It may be said that Rationes decem (also published in Latin in 1605) became one of the fundamental apologetic texts in Poland of the early-modern age, and St Edmund Campion, in a sense, became the patron of controversial theology, which would find its confirmation in the 18th century adaptation of Nicholas Sanders and Edward Rishton’s work De origine ac progressu schismatis Anglicani (1748) written by Jan Poszakowski.

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