ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses an anti-Luther polemic from the kingdom of Poland, De afflictione ecclesiae, written by the bishop, humanist and court poet Andrzej Kryzcki and printed in Krakow in 1527. It explores how this work, by one of Poland's leading neo-Latin writers of the period, functioned as a polemic: how it attacked and characterized heresy and heretics, how in the process it constructed orthodoxy itself. The chapter argues that the literary techniques which Krzycki uses in De afflictione ecclesiae to discredit Luther and elicit sympathy for the old church are not purely of literary concern rather, if they define the Reformation as the terminal splitting up of the medieval church. It acts of imagining and articulating religious difference through polemical works constitutes the heart of the Reformation itself, an act which made that Reformation possible, while building on the medieval church's experience of identifying itself against a heretical or non-Christian Other.
