Jerzy Kloczowski, et al. Histoire religeuse de la Pologne by Robert M. Kingdon

Summary

Many readers of this journal no doubt know of the remarkable group of scholars specializing in the history of religion at the Catholic University in Lublin. Their work brings to ecclesiastical history of the traditional type fresh and suggestive insights drawn from geography, inspired in part by the pioneering work of Gabriel Le Bras in France, plus insights drawn from sociology. Most of this work, naturally enough, has been published in Polish and is thus not accessible to many of us in the west. It is therefore a special delight to the western community of ecclesiastical historians that a magisterial synthesis of the work of the Lublin school, covering the history of religion in Poland from the tenth-century introduction of Christianity to 1980, is being published in western languages, at first in Italian, now in French.

Jerzy Kłoczowski, the general editor of this volume, already has a formidable international reputation among ecclesiastical historians. This volume will surely extend that reputation more widely. In addition to the introduction, he has written an authoritative chapter on religion in Poland during the high middle ages and is co-author of two eloquent chapters on recent developments, one on the appalling impact of the Nazi occupation on religion in Poland, the other on the astonishing health of Catholicism in Poland under a Communist government. In these last two. chapters, one finds a number of personal touches, for example evidence of Kłoczowski's obvious affection and respect for the late Cardinal Wyszynski. Eleven other authors also drafted chapters for this volume. Its value is further enhanced by the contributions of a team of geographers and other assistants.

Chapters that particularly impressed me, in addition to the ones in which Kłoczowski had a personal hand, were by Litak on the Reformation period and Bieńkowski on the period of the Enlightenment and Partitions. Litak goes well beyond the work of the Lublin school to incorporate the research of a number of excellent Polish Marxist historians in his account of a period that witnessed considerable growth of various Protestant and radical churches in Poland, followed by a thorough re-Catholicizing of the country.