Censorship in Poland: From the Beginnings to the Enlightenment

For much of its history Poland enjoyed the reputation of being, in Janusz Tazbir's words, "a state without stakes". Even prior to its dynastic union with Lithuania in 1386, Poland was a multi-ethnic state, whose rulers tended to respect religious and cultural diversity. Germans played a key role in developing towns in the Middle Ages; Armenians and Tatars were part of the kingdom from at least the 15th century; the expansion of the Polish kingdom eastwards under Kazimierz the Great (1333-70) in the 1340s-1360s brought Orthodox dioceses into its orbit; and Jews from all over Europe, actively encouraged by Polish kings, sought refuge in Poland from the end of the 13th century. The pre-eminence of the Catholic Church in religious life did not equate with iron control over other faiths and the ruthless elimination of dissenting views.

Traditionally the Cracow printer, Szwajpolt Fiol, is seen as the first victim of censorship in the Polish lands. His printing of four Cyrillic books in 1491 comprising hymns, prayers and psalms for religious services for the Orthodox church, appears to have been less important than some off-the-cuff heretical comments he was alleged to have made. Although the Church prohibited their distribution and furthermore banned the printing of books in Cyrillic, they continued to circulate in eastern Poland.

Some fifty years before the advent of printing to Poland (1473), close historical links with Bohemia exposed Poland to Hussite influences. Before the refoundation of the University of Cracow in 1400, Polish scholars were often educated and went on to teach at the Charles University in Prague. After the Council of Constance, Mikolaj Traba, Archbishop of Poznan, proscribed Hussitism and its works in his Statuty (1420). In 1424, Wladyslaw Jagiello (1386-1434) reinforced the ban with his Edict of Wielun, although this did not prevent him from undertaking a military operation with Prokop the Great against their mutual enemy, the Teutonic Knights, in 1432. The crushing of a Polish Hussite rebellion led by Spytek of Melsztyn, Castellan of Belz, in 1439 failed to extirpate the "contagion". Around 1449, Andrzej Galka, sometime Rector of the Jagiellonian University and author of the famous Song of Wycliffe, faced charges of being a Hussite, and fled to Silesia. Those persecuted for Hussitism may have seen their books burnt, but usually did not follow them to the stake, and in European terms Poland was remarkably lenient in its treatment of heretics.

The first expurgated book seems to have been Miechowit's Chronica Polonorum (1519), the earliest printed history of Poland. Sensing a potentially large audience for the work, its printer Hieronim Wietor sought to gain exclusive publication rights for the next 6 years while the book was still at press. However, the Royal Chancellor, Jan Laski, ordered the book's confiscation on the grounds of offence to the ruling dynasty, its government and other distinguished personages, and the Polish nation. Royal censorship in the form of the Senate questioned the doubts expressed in the legitimacy of Jagiello's sons by his fourth wife, Zofia, who was nearly fifty years younger. Criticism of the reigns of the two previous kings and the offence to the Chancellor's own vanity by his diminished role in events inter alia, led to the removal of several pages and a rewrite to enhance Laski's reputation. Thus "revised", the work appeared in 1521.

Institutionalized controls proper commenced around this time, in response to Leo X's bull Exurge Domine of 1520. Zygmunt I's Edict of Torun (24 July 1520), which was reissued several times, condemned Luther's writings, forbidding their import, reading and sale. This was followed by the burning of Luther's works in German and Latin there on 1 April 1521 - an action that proved extremely unpopular with the inhabitants. From the outset the penalties for possession of Luther's works were severe, entailing confiscation of property and banishment; but in subsequent edicts, where the ban extended to works by Luther's followers, possession and printing could be punishable by death.

Zygmunt's 1523 Edict set up due process for the printing of works in Poland: the Rector of Cracow University was to inspect every book prior to pressing and distribution. This privilege was confirmed in 1540, where a four-man committee was to be established at the university to deal with censorship. The Edict signalled the introduction of both preventive and repressive censorship, and booksellers' and printers' premises were searched for heretical works.

As part of his general drive against Lutheranism, in 1522 Zygmunt instructed the municipal council of Gdansk not to disseminate works containing the new religious doctrines. In 1526, the council rose up in protest and declared Lutheranism to be the official religion. Zygmunt quickly put down the revolt, hanged the ringleaders, and restored Catholicism. In 1534 and 1540, young Poles were banned from going abroad to study at German universities and importing Lutheran works. In 1543, under pressure from the nobility who zealously protected their rights, these restrictions were relaxed to allow travel to foreign universities if studies there did not contravene the Church teaching. Nevertheless, as a face-saving formulation for the King, the ban on the import of books and any religious "novelties" remained in force. Although no "heretical" work was printed in Cracow in the first half of the 16th century, such works undoubtedly circulated illegally.

The accession of Zygmunt August (1548-72) brought a significant relaxation in official repression of Protestantism. Despite confirming the Catholic Church primacy in Polish life with the December 1550 Edict against heresy, and the March 1556 Edict, which made the possession of "heretical" (no longer just Lutheran) works a crime - in whose pursuit the secular authorities should aid the Church - Zygmunt remained a monarch who in practical terms adopted very much a non-interventionist stance in matters of faith. He famously declared that he was "King of the people, not of their consciences", and owned a substantial library of "heretical" works, often dedicated to him by their authors. In one famous case, he felt moved to protect the reformer Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski (1503-72) from persecution. Modrzewski's magnum opus entitled On the Reform of the Republic (Cracow, 1551) had earlier fallen foul of ecclesiastical displeasure in Poland. Author and printer sought official opinion concerning the fourth book (of five originally to be published) devoted to the Church. Printing was suspended while that book was at press and never completed. No action was taken against either man, but the work was not published in its entirety until 1554 and in Basle (a second edition was published there in 1559). The fifth book on schooling was published with the first three in a Polish translation in Losk (1577), but the book on the Church never appeared in Poland-Lithuania, though it has been suggested that this was due to events making Modrzewski's proposals anachronistic.

Calvinism found more disciples in Poland-Lithuania than Lutheranism owing to the greater compatibility of its democratic structures with the Polish nobility's political aspirations, and also because it was not a "German" faith. From the early 1550s, the nobility began to expel Catholic priests from their estates, refuse the payment of tithes, and set up Calvinist churches and presses. The first Calvinist Synod took place in 1554, and the nobility's autonomy from the Catholic Church was officially confirmed at the diet of 1562-63, when they overthrew ecclesiastical jurisdiction. At the height of its popularity, around 20% of the lesser nobility professed Calvinism, while amongst the lay magnates in the Senate there was an absolute majority. Religious equality for dissidents was definitively enshrined in the Confederation of Warsaw of January 1573 - a list of conditions drawn up by the nobility for Poland's first elected king, Henri Valois, which each subsequent king had to swear to observe prior to his coronation. These forbade the bloodshed, confiscation of property, imprisonment or banishment of dissenters on religious grounds. Although books were not specified in the document, it later served as a basis for challenging censorship.

The one group explicitly excluded from the Confederation were the Arians or Socinians, whose radical views on the Holy Trinity had led them to break away from the Calvinists by the mid-1560s. After founding their capital at Rakow in 1569 under the protection of the magnate Michal Sienicki, they began to print proto-Communist, pacifist and dissident theological texts, including several versions of the Racovian Catechism (1575/1601/1605), which made their way and were suppressed all across Europe. The Arians were isolated even amongst their fellow dissidents: the 1595 Synod of Torun, intended to reconcile Calvinists, Czech Brethren and Lutherans, published a ban on accepting or reading any Arian works and in January 1602, the Lutheran municipal council banned the import or sale of such works in the city. For their part, the Arians readily pressed works by Catholics, Jesuits, and their fellow dissidents and reserved censorship largely for preserving their own doctrinal purity. Their Synod of Lublin in 1579 decreed that no book should be published without preventive censorship, but Lithuanian delegates refused to accept this stipulation and acted as though it did not apply. One of the key figures of the less radical wing, Szymon Budny, who opposed the pacifist stance adopted by the Arians in Poland, published Paleologus attack on excessive radicalism, Defensio verae sententiae de magistratu politico, at Losk in 1580 in express defiance of such restrictions. In the more repressive times of the 16th century, which saw the closure of their centres at Nowogrodek in Lithuania by royal decree (1618) and at Rakow (1638) by order of the Diet, Arians practised self-restraint, taking great pains to avoid antagonizing their religious opponents. (The Bohemian Brethren, who started to arrive in Poland from 1550 and set up a centre at Leszno, proved even more cautious in their respect. Their publishing house, established in 1631, was destroyed during the Swedish War in 1656, allegedly for printing a eulogy to Charles Gustavus written by Comenius). Finally, in 1658, using their participation on the Swedish side during the invasion of 1654 as a pretext - a charge which applied equally well to the Calvinists, but they were not pursued - Jan Kazimierz (1648-68) banned them from Polish territory.

The 1573 Act of Confederation also covered the Greek Orthodox, but, in effect, merely confirmed the liberties they had enjoyed from the mid-15th century when Wladyslaw Warnenczyk granted the Privilege of Buda (1443) to Orthodox clergy in Hungary and Poland. In so doing Warnenczyk acknowledged the complete equality of the Orthodox with the Catholic rite and prohibited secular and state intervention in Orthodox jurisdiction. This position altered after 1596, when the Union of Brest saw a schism develop in the Church between the Orthodox who continued to acknowledge Constantinople and the Uniates, who transferred their allegiance to the Pope. The Orthodox were thus dis-established and were not recognized again until 1633. This opened the way to censorship of Orthodox works on the grounds that they posed a threat to the political system in their attacks on the 1596 Union, which they regarded as schismatic. In May 1610, Zygmunt III banned the reading and distribution of books pressed in Russian at the Russian printworks in Vilnius, after the publication of Melecjusz Smotrycki's Threnos. This work's description of contemporary events, specifically the Union of Brest, led it to be seen as a challenge to ecclesiastical and secular authority. It was not until the Synod of Zamosc in 1720, however, that censorship in the Uniate community came to be regulated and unified. In 1640, by contrast, the Metropolitan of Kiev, who saw Uniate publications as heretical, provided direction for Orthodox censorship. By the 18th century, when Poland had fallen largely under Russian control, the defence of Orthodox religious rights provided an excuse for Russian intervention on a constitutional basis. The 1769 Eternal Treaty between Poland and Russia accorded the protection of Greek Orthodox and dissident rights to Catherine the Great.

In some respects, the Jews found themselves in a similar position to the Uniates. They received privileges directly from the monarch, and like the nobility enjoyed considerable autonomy, which was crowned by the creation of their own separate parliament, the Vaad Arba Aratzot or Council of the Four Lands (ca. 1560-1764). The Jews sought state intervention in matters of religious dissent as well as protection from anti-Semitic attacks. The kahal requested the prohibition of Sebastian Miczynski's Mirror of the Polish Crown expressing the profound insults and great anxieties it receives from the Jews (1618), claiming it incited public disorder, because of its descriptions of alleged Jewish blood rituals requiring the murder of Christian children. In 1628, however, Zygmunt III issued a decree banning the publication and sale of Hebrew books, which caused the Jewish community to plead with the bishop of Cracow, Marcin Szyszkowski, to persuade the king to reverse his decision. The Talmud was proscribed by the Index, yet continued to circulate in Poland-Lithuania. In 1757, the burning of 1000 copies of the Talmud was ordered by the bishop of Kamieniec Podolski, who saw an opportunity to win converts to Catholicism from the Frankist controversy. In 1758, the kahal successfully appealed to the monarch to restore order.

Concern for public order in respect of defence of the realm lay behind some of Stefan Bathory's (1575-1586) pronouncements on book and information control. In July 1579 during his campaign against Ivan the Terrible, he issued a ban on divulging military secrets on pain of death. In February 1580, he ordered that printers and booksellers should ensure that history books, whether old or new, honour Poland's good name - an order specifically aimed at counteracting the propaganda of the Hapsburgs who were allied with Ivan. Bathory even showed a pro-active stance in his information policy, by travelling with his own printer, who not only published royal edicts, but also descriptions of events and literary works in praise of Bathory and his Chancellor Jan Zamoyski written by the great Renaissance poet, Jan Kochanowski.

Bathory was probably the last monarch to respect the Act of Confederation fully in letter and spirit. Although Catholic attacks on the dissidents were still taken seriously towards the end of the 16th century, if they were considered a threat to public order, the accession of the Swedish Catholic Zygmunt III (1587-1632) saw the pendulum swing firmly back towards the Counter-Reformation. The Index was published for the first time in 1603 and rapidly went through a number of reprints, until the most extensive version appeared in 1617 with a list appended by Bishop Szyszkowski devoted to works he regarded as harmful to the Church, indecent or libellous. Polish works banned under its terms included the Calvinist Bible, published under the patronage of Mikolaj Radziwill in Brest in 1563, Kasper Twardowski's erotic verse, Cupid's Lessons, and the Postylla of the great Calvinist writer, Mikolaj Rej. In 1634, Cardinal Wezyk condemned the Gdansk Bible (1632), the finally revised version of the Radziwill Bible of 1563. Modrzewski came under proscription as did Socinian works. Other categories of harmful works included the so-called Sowizdrzal (Owl-glass/Eulenspiegel) trend of satires on the social order, written largely anonymously by university students throughout the 15th and early 16th centuries. In addition to the Indexes, papal nuncios provided on-site guidance to the Curia. Given the multi-denominational character of the country, the re-Catholicization of Poland was seen as a long-term project, as a Vatican instruction from December 1622 indicates: "Since in a country where Catholics may associate with heretics there can be no complete prohibition of reading evil books that may pollute the minds of Catholics, we must at least strive to ensure that such works are not printed or imported from other lands; and if they do come covertly, to ensure that they are not sold by having the king impose severe penalties .. and so please remind the Lord Bishops that they are to carry out their duties in this regard, taking the Index as their guide and from time to time ordering searches of bookshops" (Buchwald-Pelcowa, 1995, p. 204). From the latter half of the 17th century, synods and pastoral letters became the most common channels for informing the laity of banned works. The bloodshed characteristic of the Counter-Reformation elsewhere in Europe was unknown to Poland, mainly because of the renowned Polish traditions of tolerance, but also due to the gradual return of the Protestant noble families to the Church, a process which Zygmunt III and later monarchs' preferment of Catholics for senior appointments undoubtedly facilitated.

In the first half of the 17th century the Catholic Church in Poland began to take a more vigorous approach to censorship. The Synod of Cracow (1621) condemned not only books, but also licentious and backward art. Bishop Szyszkowski strongly recommended the clothing of indecent (naked) portrayals of Adam and Eve and, especially, Mary Magdalene. His instructions applied to portrayals of the Virgin Mary, who appeared fully clothed in Baroque art. The immodesty of figures of Adam and Eve on royal tapestries was also covered at this time. In 1632, the clergy introduced a clause enshrining respect for the rights of the Catholic Church. The Synod of Warsaw, convened under Bishop Lubienski in 1643, consolidated preventive censorship in Poland by banning anonymous along with anti-Catholic and immoral works. Catholic bigotry reached its height in the first half of the 18th century: the 1720 Synod of Poznan codified heresy in all its forms and the laws to be employed against it; in 1731 Jan Andrzej Zaluski tract The Two Swords whipped up Catholic antipathy towards the religious dissidents, and went hand-in-hand with demands for ecclesiastical intrusion into individuals' private reading matter. In the diet, an Edict limiting dissident rights was passed in 1717, and the expulsion of the last Protestant - the Calvinist Andrzej Piotrowski - soon followed in 1718. In this way, Poland's neighbours could justify their intervention in internal Polish affairs in the name of defending Polish civil liberties against the Poles themselves [see below].

The Baroque, particularly after the mid-17th century, is often referred to as the "Age of Manuscript" since major works frequently did not reach the press and often were not published until the 19th century. The greater restrictions imposed by the ecclesiastical authorities were but one of the factors responsible. In the aftermath of the Swedish War (1654-60), which devastated the country, publishing practice underwent a major change: the financial risks printing entailed meant that even magnates preferred to pay copyists than fund expensive editions - which encouraged authors and printers to seek the censor's approval with increasing frequency after 1618 to avoid additional expense. Moreover, nobles preferred to sponsor three-dimensional art instead of literature as lasting monuments to themselves, except where the literary work directly magnified the clan's glory. Printworks belonging to collectives, and increasingly to religious groups, began to prevail over private printers. Varieties of self-censorship also played a part in author's decisions to leave their works in manuscript, be it on grounds of personal taste - overlapping to a large degree with their readers' - or for the sake of their own political careers: the greatest writer of the age, Jan Andrzej Morsztyn (1620-93), who had written most of his works before becoming Crown Treasurer in 1661, let them circulate in manuscript rather than risk any publication damaging to his career. He was merely following in the footsteps of famous predecessors such as Andrzej Krzycki, the Renaissance bishop of Cracow and later Cardinal, whose poems portraying various figures from his time as courtier at Zygmunt I's court remained unpublished. Readers themselves expurgated works: Catholics removed whole "Trifles" from the posthumous enlarged second edition (1574) of Mikolaj Rej's Bestiary, in view of the offence to their religious sensibilities.

Defamation provided grounds for intervention in texts. Rej's epigram, Quarrel with a Neighbour, the neighbour being a powerful magnate, was removed from his Bestiary. Foreign protests about Polish works occasionally could produce equally decisive action. James I of England sent his ambassador, John Dickenson, to demand the burning of Kasper Cichocki's polemic against non-Catholics, Alloquiorum Oscensium sive variorum familiarium sermonum libri V (1615), and penalties for the author and printer, for comparing him to Nero and Julian the Apostate, and challenging his right to the throne. The author's natural death in 1616 brought the matter to a close. The Tsar's emissaries were even more demanding: Muscovite ambassadors to Poland were required to study all Polish works for unflattering comments or defamatory attacks on Muscovy, especially works relating to military campaigns. When the military situation lay in Russia's favour, these requests received greater sympathy. Grigorii Gavrilovich Pushkin required Jan Kazimierz's condemnation of Samuel Twardowski'sWladyslaw IV, Krol Polski i Szwedzki (Leszno, 1649, 1650), a work celebrating the king's predecessor and sometime pretender to the Russian throne, and several pages were burnt in public to considerable Polish indignation. In 1672, Russian complaints - this time ineffectual - extended to two ceilings decorated by Tomasso Donabella in the Senator's Chamber of the Royal Castle in Warsaw, which depicted the Polish victory over Russian forces at Kluszyn in 1610 and Hetman Zolkiewski's presentation of the captured Russian Tsar and his brothers to Zygmunt III at the diet in 1611. Especially in the late 18th century, however, Poles exhibited great caution regarding works potentially offensive to more powerful neighbours: in the 1770 reprint of Modrzewski's De emendanda, a passage dealing with 16th-century Prussian affairs was removed for fear of antagonizing Frederick the Great. Similarly, in 1788, Marshall Mniszek suspended publication of Jan Potocki's brochure Essai de logique for 24 hours, since the King thought it might jeopardize Polish-Russian relations. Although he protested that he bore all responsibility since his name appeared on the cover, Potocki acceded to the work's withdrawal.

In the absence of any legislation specifically designed to curtail censorship, Poland-Lithuania's decentralized political system protected authors. The strong class unity which prevailed amongst the nobility, and cut across religious dividing lines, helped to offset the increasing stringency of ecclesiastical control. The condemnation of the expurgated version of Nieproznujace proznowanie (Non-Idle Idleness, 1674) by Wespazjan Kochowski by Andrzej Trzebicki, Bishop of Cracow, which stemmed from a power struggle between the Church and the Jagiellonian University over primacy in censorship matters, did not result in punitive action against the author, who had received the backing of the diet.

Another counterweight to the inexorable advance of the Counter-Reformation lay in the privileges granted to royal towns such as Gdansk and Torun, which continued to enjoy considerable autonomy. Their municipal councils, dominated by Lutherans, managed the local book culture by granting licences to printers and book sellers as well as through specific interventions. Prior to the 1570, when the council introduced greater regulation in response to constant protests from various quarters - including English monarchs, the Elector of Prussia, and the Polish Crown - about libellous works, considerable freedom for publishers had existed in Gdansk. Subsequently, repression of the works of other Protestant denominations came to be a regular occurrence: in July 1615, a magistrate banned all the works of the Calvinist Fabricius, and in 1645, an ordinance prohibited the printing of Mennonite and Socinian literature. As the Counter-Reformation gained ground, a ban on works attacking Catholicism appeared in the 1630s. Szymon Reiniger, the only Catholic printer permitted to operate in the city, gained the right to do so only after a lengthy struggle in 1662 and on condition that he published nothing hostile to Lutheranism. The Jesuits, however, were prevented from opening print works in Gdansk.

Like Gdansk, Torun received a royal privilege from Zygmunt August in 1558, which enabled the Lutheran Church to enjoy religious liberties. Its City Council was more overt in its hostility to Catholic works, banning "anything papist" in June 1601. Its manifest hostility towards other Protestants led it to obstruct the sale of Calvin's De sacramentis in the 1620s. All mention of the Tumult of 1724 was banned in the city. Similarly in private towns such as Leszno or on the estates of Janusz Radziwill the Black, which were both Calvinist centres, the religious practices of the owner dictated publishing practice.

Commercial rivalry amongst publishers and booksellers played its part in acts of repression, especially over the right to print profitable almanacs - the nobility's favourite reading matter. In 1617, rivals of the bookseller Jan Kownacki of Lublin, who had promised to convert to Catholicism and not sell heretical works when granted the right to open his shop, instigated an action to have his privilege revoked on the pretext that he had failed to comply. Zygmunt III confirmed the removal of his rights in 1618. Similar intentions lay behind calls to limit the number of print works in the following century: in 1725, the firms of Kownacki and Rozycki pleaded for such "regulation" in Warsaw; and in June 1789 the printer and publisher Dufour presented to parliament a memorandum on the management of print works in the Kingdom arguing the same.

The Jesuits, who arrived in Poland in 1564, played a major role in Church censorship, both helping bishops to censor works and collaborating with them to defend their own reputation from attack. They also supervised book burning, as in 1611, when the death of the local Calvinist protector led to the destruction of the press and the burning of heretical works in Kamieniec Podolski. Works written in Polish, and therefore comprehensible to wider circles of readers, constituted the Jesuits' main target. Yet at the same time, they assisted the preservation of such books by assiduously amassing them in their libraries: at the time of the order's dissolution in 1773, 1963 of the 9952 volumes in the Vilnius Academy were heretical works.