Dr%20Natalia%20Nowakowska: List of publications

This article traces the problematic way in which the word ‘dynasty’ has evolved in western languages and historiography. Analysing European historical dictionaries (sixteenth century to present), and thousands of printed book titles (fifteenth–twentieth centuries), it shows how the word's meaning shifted significantly following publication of volume 5 of the Encylopédie in 1755 – from its ancient sense of ‘government, regime’ per se, to ‘a hereditary line of princes’ specifically. This relatively recent linguistic change has created a risk of anachronism and conceptual confusion in twentieth and twenty-first century scholarship on early modern Europe, where ‘dynasty’ has been variously taken, e.g. to refer to the history of government, succession practices and/or royal subjectivity. The article outlines the findings of a major project on the Jagiellonian dynasty (c.1385–1572) which has tackled this linguistic-conceptual problem, by attempting to recover how medieval/Renaissance sources described this ruling lineage in an era before ‘dynasty-as-family’ had entered political-historical vocabulary.

The long nineteenth century saw a wholesale recalibration of Jagiellonian memory in Polish culture, in the highly charged context of the Partitions. In 1795, Russia, Prussia and Austria-Hungary conducted their third and final Partition, or annexation, of Poland-Lithuania. The Polish monarchy ceased to exist as both territory and institution. The genealogical imperative in Vasa-led memory of the Jagiellonians can also be seen in a series of striking seventeenth-century examples. In the 1640s, Sigismund III's son King Ladislaus IV commissioned the so-called Marble Room in the castle in Warsaw, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth's new capital. Designed by the Italian architect Giovanni Battista Gisleni, this was to be the most splendid reception room in the complex. Golden Age rhetoric first emerged in the immediate aftermath of Sigismund Augustus's death, as an early modern retrospective judgement on this ruling house. In 1585, a poem composed for the wedding of Princess Anna Jagiellon praised the royal line which had 'given Poland golden centuries'.

If terms are associated with particular historical periods, then ’polemic’ is firmly rooted within early modern print culture, the apparently inevitable result of religious controversy and the rise of print media. Taking a broad European approach, this collection brings together specialists on medieval as well as early modern culture in order to challenge stubborn assumptions that medieval culture was homogenous and characterized by consensus; and that literary discourse is by nature ’eirenic’. Instead, the volume shows more clearly the continuities and discontinuities, especially how medieval discourse on the sins of the tongue continued into early modern discussion; how popular and influential medieval genres such as sermons and hagiography dealt with potentially heterodox positions; and the role of literary, especially fictional, debate in developing modes of articulating discord, as well as demonstrating polemic in action in political and ecclesiastical debate. Within this historical context, the position of early modern debates as part of a more general culture of articulating discord becomes more clearly visible. The structure of the volume moves from an internal textual focus, where the nature of polemic can be debated, through a middle section where these concerns are also played out in social practice, to a more historical group investigating applied polemic. In this way a more nuanced view is provided of the meaning, role, and effect of ’polemic’ both broadly across time and space, and more narrowly within specific circumstances.

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.