2019 Recipient

The Kulczycki Book Prize in Polish Studies (formerly the Orbis Book Prize), established in 1996 and sponsored by the Kulczycki family, former owners of the Orbis Books Ltd. of London, England, is awarded annually for the best book in any discipline, on any aspect of Polish affairs, published in the previous calendar year.

Winner: Natalia Nowakowska
Title: King Sigismund of Poland and Martin Luther: The Reformation before Confessionalization (Oxford University Press)

Natalia Nowakowska’s book reshapes fundamental historical paradigms about the geographic parameters of the Protestant Reformation and the chronology of the Reformation in Poland. Looking at how Lutheranism penetrated the Polish space, Nowakowska explores the causality of Poland’s famous early modern religious tolerance, demonstrating that King Sigismund I permitted a broad range of religious dissent so long as it did not challenge his political authority. In Nowakowska’s account, however, the Polish king’s religious inclusivity was motivated less by explicit political or economic concerns, as previous scholars have argued, and more by religious sensibilities of the time. Sigismund’s views, she argues, reflected a continuation of medieval “catholic” consensus building and acceptance of divergent views. Sigismund’s tolerance of his Lutheran subjects was thus not an early wave of enlightenment thinking but rather the last iteration of an inclusive Catholic Church. In her marvelously vivid account of Lutheran political movements on Polish territory, Nowakowska captures the complexity of early sixteenth-century church-state relations and fluidly integrates the religious history of the Polish Republic into wider European trends, portraying it as a key example of how Protestantism dramatically ruptured worldviews across the continent.

Co-Winner: Jochen Böhler