Within the history of toleration the case of Poland presents a somewhat reverse chronology compared with developments in the rest of early modern Europe. The famous Polish culture of tolerance was essentially a phenomenon of the late Middle Ages and the sixteenth century. It had developed in the context of the construction of a multinational monarchy under the Jagiellonian kings, and it offered a legal and ideological framework that was able fairly easily to accommodate the Reformation once it gained massive support among the Polish and Lithuanian nobility from the 1550s onwards. The subsequent period instead saw tolerance in decline. From roughly the mid seventeenth century onwards religious tension both between Christians and non-Christians and among the Christian confessions seemed to grow steadily, finally culminating in a series of violent conflicts over the so-called ‘dissident’ question that immediately preceded the partition of 1772. In short: the Poles seem to have ‘invented’ tolerance well before it became an issue of humanistic and proto-enlightened debate; but they apparently abandoned it precisely at the time when elsewhere religious tolerance became part of a commonly shared European culture.

This chapter offers some tentative explanations of this phenomenon, focusing mainly on what seems to have been the turning point in this long-term development: the period of confessionalisation. In this context three points will be argued.

1. The history of the legal and constitutional framework for religious toleration in Poland-Lithuania has to be clearly distinguished from the parallel developments on the levels of religious culture and popular religiosity, since the turn towards intolerance in Poland-Lithuania from the mid-seventeenth century onwards seems to have been essentially a phenomenon of the latter levels.