Paper short abstract:

This paper examines St. Maximilian Kolbe’s publishing activities prior to his arrest and ultimate martyrdom. Through the implementation of modern twists on “old technologies,” Kolbe established the most prolific publishing house in Poland and the largest Franciscan monastery in the world.

Paper long abstract:

One of the best-known Christian martyrs of the twentieth century is St. Maximilian Maria Kolbe, OFM Conv (1894-1941). His offer of himself in the place of another man who had been selected to die in the starvation bunker at Auschwitz is often recalled as an illustration of the power of love over evil. Less attention is accorded to Kolbe’s work as a publisher and guardian before his incarceration. Kolbe’s extensive publishing projects sought to promote devotion to the Virgin Mary under her title of the Immaculate Conception. Kolbe used modern twists on “old technologies” in dramatically effective ways. In 1921, he began to publish Rycerz Niepokalanej (Knight of the Immaculata) with an initial print run of 5,000 copies – a number that grew to a million by the end of 1938. The earliest issues of Rycerz Niepokalanej were produced by a commercial printer in Kraków, but Kolbe soon set his mind to acquiring his own press to cut costs. Within a year, he purchased a second-hand press and installed it in a monastery at Grodno. As subscriptions and circulation increased, he invested in new and more sophisticated machinery and moved the operations to a friary that he established at Niepokalanów. Kolbe’s enterprise quickly became the largest publishing house in Poland. He also began a similar publishing effort associated with his mission in Japan. The rapidity and degree to which these efforts bore fruit on a grassroots level were very unusual. This paper will explore some of Kolbe’s visionary uses of technology in his evangelizing efforts.

Paper short abstract:

The paper is dedicated to the influence of the personal religiosity of Ukrainian historians, their national consciousness, methodological approaches, and cultural trends of their time (such as Enlightenment, and Romanticism) on their descriptions of the religious specificity of Ukrainian lands.

Paper long abstract:

The first half of the 19th was the time when Ukrainian intellectuals tried to understand, what kind of events and processes could be marked as parts of Ukrainian history. Special Ukrainian historical works were created then. Religion was an important dimension of the images of different Ukrainian lands in the texts by Ukrainian historians.

This paper deals with the influence of the personal religiosity of historians, their methodological approaches, and cultural trends of their time (such as Enlightenment, and Romanticism) on their descriptions of the religious specificity of Ukrainian lands. How did the global processes of formation of modern nations (imagined communities in terms of Benedict Anderson) affect the description of the religious history of Ukrainian lands by historians of the first half of the 19th century?

This project is based on the methodological approaches of the Cambridge school of intellectual history. Quantitative content analysis with MAXQDA-program was used.

It is shown that Ukrainian historians of the first half of the 19th century saved the idea of Russian-Ukrainian unity, based, among others, on Orthodox coherence. This idea was formulated in the 1670s in Kyivan Synopsis. Ukrainian historians of the first half of the 19th century (Dmitriy Bantish-Kamensky, Petro Gulak-Artemovs’ky, Osyp Bodiznskyi, Mykola Markevich, Mykhailo Maximovich) combined this early-modern paradigm with intellectual trends, that were characteristic of Enlightenment and Romanticism. For example, Mykola Markevich in his description of Union of Brest condemned it with the help of a combination of enlightenment criticism of religious violence and a very traditional apology of Orthodox Christianity as true Faith. Catholicism in the such narrative was described as hostile and alien.

The religious images in the works of Ukrainian historians were crucially important for the construction of “nation’s spirit” (in terms of Romanticism) as well as to formulate the difficult hierarchies of loyalties.

Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to examine the techniques used in the thirteenth century to deal with the spread of heresy in Medieval Universities, specifically in Paris and Oxford. It emphasizes the cases of condemnation and preceding procedures that compiled the list and the content of condemned propositions.

Paper long abstract:

The main focus of this paper is the thirteenth-century condemnations at Paris and Oxford universities. These events reflected the conflict between scientific and theological doctrines in the High Middle Ages. The most imposing above all, the condemnation of 1277, is even regarded as “the birth of modern science” by renowned physicist and historian of science Pierre Duhem. A wide range of Latin translations from Greek and Arabic became available to the Christian west throughout the thirteenth century. A significant part of these texts was Aristotle's philosophical works and commentaries of Averroes, which influenced various prominent scholars, including Siger of Brabant, Boethius of Dacia, and Thomas Aquinas. They formulated theories inspired by Aristotle's scientific principles that were often deemed heretical by the church. Because universities were ecclesiastical institutions, local churchmen were compelled to respond to the great quantity of non-Christian literature. As a result, ecclesiastical authorities encouraged by Papal letters and several anti-Aristotelian scholars began to use various condemnation practices. They aimed to draw a line between Aristotle’s scientific theories and theological views and to restore the misplaced borderline between heresy and orthodoxy. The paper seeks to explore cases of condemnation as a technique employed against heretical literature and ideas. It also examines the procedure and methods (e.g., rhetoric) that were utilized in compiling the list of condemned ideas and reviews the preceding events. Initially, lecturing on Aristotle’s libri naturales, his Metaphysics, and Commentaries of the same was prohibited. Subsequently, the ideas themselves were condemned multiple times at the university of Paris and Oxford. Overall, the main objective is to scrutinize the aforementioned techniques that were applied to resist the spread of heretical literature and the practice of teaching them in university environments during the thirteenth century.