ABSTRACT
In the years 1838 and 1840 the work of Count Valerian Krasinski dealing with the history of the Reformation in Poland appeared in print in London.1 Count Krasinski, a Calvinist, found himself in England and then in Scotland as an exile after the November Uprising in 1830-31. He was also the author of a book of lectures on the religious history of the Slavonic nations.2 Krasinski's work, The Reformation in Poland, was the first modern synthesis of the religious history of the Polish Reformation. Paradoxically, it saw the light of day not in Poland, but in England and in English, while its Polish translation only appeared in print some 60 years later.3 The author himself died in Edinburgh in 1855 and was buried there. I mention these facts for there is something symbolic in the fact that we are gathered here for a conference in St Andrews, at no great distance from Edinburgh, 150 years after the publication of interest to us, in order to consider the history of the Reformation in East-Central Europe which Count Krasinski revealed to English and Scottish readers of the nineteenth century.
