Earning Heavenly Salvation : Peasant Religion in Lesser Poland. Mid-Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries

Abstract

The book offers a comprehensive model of religious culture of peasants of the Lesser Poland in the early modern times. Its principal research topic is the influence of religion on the life and attitudes of peasants in the period of religious and social transformations resulting from the introduction of the Tridentine reform of the Catholic Church in the period starting from the peak of the Reformation movements in Poland to the Enlightenment reforms and the fall of the Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth. Due to the fact that the study focuses on an illiterate group, its issues primarily concern the so-called external religiosity of peasants as a group, discussing its social, communal, and economic aspect, along with its impact on the formation of social ethics and individual morals, beliefs, and folk rituals.