Sinners on Trial

In her first book, Jews and Heretics in Catholic Poland (2006), Magda Teter explored social contacts between Jews and Christians in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Poland-Lithuania, arguing that the Roman church’s hostility to such relationships revealed deep anxieties about its own ultimate capacity to survive in early modern Europe’s largest territorial state. Five years on, the present book offers us an extension both of the basic subject-matter, and of the bigger argument. This is essentially a study of the way in which the crime of sacrilege—the desecration of Catholic holy objects and places—was prosecuted and constructed in Poland in the century and a half following 1563, the year in which this offence came under the jurisdiction of secular criminal courts. Teter has combed exhaustively through archives in Poland and Rome—almost any sixteenth-century manuscript you care to order in a Polish diocesan archive will have Magda Teter’s name inscribed in the list of recent readers. The monograph begins with a survey of trials for church robberies, and out-and-out sacrilegious acts, such as deliberately dropping or pocketing the Host at Communion, or slashing religious pictures with swords. The book’s focus becomes more precise, however, in a series of case-studies which explore allegations of Host desecration specifically involving Jews in early modern Poland—the campaign in early seventeenth-century Poznań to construct the Carmelite Church of the Holy Blood on the site of an alleged desecration incident in a Jewish house in 1399, and the trials of Christians and Jews for Host-stealing held in Sochaczew (1556), the mining town of Bochnia (1600) and Przemyśl (1605). Using trial records themselves, evidence from urban sacred topography, and the printed images and texts generated by these high-profile cases and cults, Teter argues that Host sacrilege allegations, executions and the devotional activity they inspired all functioned as part of a wider Polish religious polemic about the Eucharist and transubstantiation, one of the great doctrinal dividing lines of the Reformation. For Catholic polemicists, the local miracles which were reported after incidents of alleged Host desecration (notably, bleeding Hosts, sudden death of the accused) were proof of Christ’s bodily presence; for Calvinist opponents, sacrilege trials provided an opportunity to mock Catholic credulity and idolatry. Teter concludes that in this epic religious contest within Polish Christianity, sacrilege was needed ‘to affirm the sacred; it helped to sharpen spatial and religious boundaries’ (p. 91). As such, this book is ultimately about Polish late Reformation and Counter Reformation polemic and discourse, and the part which Jews were co-opted to play in it, rather than a recovery of Jewish experience per se

Art · Theology · Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics · Philosophy