Hollow Law?

In the ‘core’ lands of the Polish Crown (korona), the chief instrument of King Sigismund’s Reformation policy was the anti-Lutheran edict. He issued eleven such edicts (1520–40), at a more prolific rate than any other prince in Christendom, the first predating even Pope Leo X’s famous Exsurge Domine bull against Luther. This chapter seeks to account for a central paradox: the edicts were draconian in content, but went entirely unenforced by the Crown, which repeatedly ignored local requests to implement them. The symbolic functions of anti-Reformation edicts, both internationally and domestically, are explored, for example in signalling royal piety. However, the timing and wording of these edicts (which speak of disorder, but not of ‘heresy’) reveal their key purpose to have been not the policing of religious belief, but the prevention of Lutheranism in the King’s primary understanding of that word—a revolt by the lower social orders.