The Enlightenment literary canon and its reception among the parish clergy in the Diocese of Płock in the time of Bishop Michał Jerzy Poniatowski

Abstract

Because of the priests’ obligation to preach, teach catechisms, and hear confessions, books were essential in ministry. Bishops asked about them during visitations and sporadically recommended certain works, but it was not common to propose a comprehensive, coherent and well-designed set of obligatory reading for parsons. However, such an exceptional literary canon was created under the name of Bishop Michał Jerzy Poniatowski. The research problems of this article are the ideology of the proposed set of books and its reception among the parish clergy in the Diocese of Płock. I examined pastoral letters, recommended works and visitation protocols informing about book collections. As a result, I concluded that the canon represented the ideas of Catholic Enlightenment such as: orthodoxy, intellectualism, focus on morality, classicist style and rehabilitation of reason. However, the parish clergy accepted only practical and well-known genres regardless of stylistic and ideological novelty