This essay explores the problematic ways in which six Polish chronicles, printed between 1521 and 1695, ‘remembered’ the tumultuous events of the Reformation in that monarchy. The texts discussed include histories of Poland and her church/es by a late medieval cleric (1521), a Renaissance humanist (1530s), a Polish-vernacular lay historian (1597), a Calvinist minister (1679), an anti-Trinitarian exile (1685), and a Jesuit (1695). The essay finds that each of kingdom’s many churches honed their own versions of Reformation events, leading to a fragmented set of tales. Borrowing a phrase from social science, the essay argues that in early modern Poland we find a ‘pillarisation’ of Reformation memory. In a kingdom where toleration and coexistence of churches (Lutheran, Calvinist, Catholic, anti-Trinitarian) long flourished, no unified social memory of the Reformations successfully emerged; with long-term impacts on the historiography of the European Reformation. The essay asks why one of the few common threads to run through these highly divergent early modern narratives is the tale of Catherine of Kraków, a widow executed in 1539 for converting to Judaism, and what role Jewishness and gender play in the articulation of Reformation memory in this part of Christendom.
