Scholarship on anti-Reformation printed polemic routinely describes it as a doomed exercise which the Latin church embarked on reluctantly. This article uses new evidence from the Polish monarchy (c.1517-1540) to argue that such polemics had multiple functions: giving counsel, converting heretics, forging ‘pious’ identities in print, the self-fashioning of authors as both pastors and humanists, and defence of humanism itself. It is argued that these works show Polish high clergy being drawn beyond a traditional institutional engagement with the press (e.g. liturgies, statutes), and into a broader, discursive early sixteenth-century printed sphere, and a new section of the book market.
