Comic · Brill

Challenging Nobility and Protestants in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth

Jan Chądzyński (C. 1602-1660) and the Jesuit Political and Social Thought

This book examines how Jesuit political, social, and polemical ideas functioned in seventeenth-century Poland-Lithuania through the case of Jan Chądzyński (c.1602-1660). It reconstructs his biography, establishes his dispersed and often misattributed writings, and analyzes his political and social treatises and anti-Protestant satires. Drawing on Jesuit archival records and textual analysis, the study situates Chądzyński's views on royal authority, noble liberty, social injustice, and Protestantism within the political debates of the Commonwealth and the wider framework of early modern Jesuit thought in Europe, while showing how local controversies in Vilnius shaped the form and aims of his writing.