Professional Documents
Culture Documents
the Reformation
MAGDA TETER
Criminal law became a
key tool in the effort to
legitimize Church authority
in post-Reformation
Poland. Recounting
dramatic stories of torture, trial, and punishment
involving Christians and Jews, this is the first
book to consider the sacrilege accusations of the
early modern period within the broader context
of politics and common crime.
SuperbIn her captivating narrative, Teter has
painstakingly documented how the body politic
and the body of Christ were inextricably bound
together through the early modern period, and
how the Reformation not only failed to diminish
the host-desecration calumny but, at least in
Catholic Poland, gave it new energy.
ALLAN NADLER, JEWISH IDEAS DAILY
Teters brilliant book shows how accusations
of host desecration leveled against the Jews in
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Poland took
place against the backdrop of conflicts between