Wojciech Kordyzon (University of Warsaw)
In the 16th century, Königsberg was becoming an increasingly important local political and cultural centre in the Duchy of Prussia. Having adopted Lutheranism as state confession, the role of the city in the local confessional debates had increased, including the role it played for the dissidents in the neighbouring lands of Poland-Lithuania. As a centre of printing, Königsberg remained far beyond the largest cities in the Holy Roman Empire. Although located on the periphery for German speakers, it filled in the gap in offering the books in the vernacular , such as Polish, through the publishing programmes, which were shaped by confessionally driven Protestant publishers (Jan Seklucjan, Ostafi Trepka, and Hieronim Malecki), who collaborated with the Prussian printing shops. In my paper, I analyse the choices of genre made by the publishers working in Königsberg (showing the functional consequences of those choices), compare them with other local tendencies, and examine how those choices were referred to by the publishers in the paratexts. I argue that the Polish publishing programme was planned as a set of fundamental genres for religious education in the vernacular as seen from the Lutheran perspective, thus being complementary (for Protestants) and competitive (for Catholics) in regard to publications provided by the religious communities in Poland-Lithuania.