Chiming with recent scholarly efforts to trace the impact of the British reformations on continental Europe, this book focuses on the circulation of British literature in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. A translated, expanded and revised version of Hanusiewicz-Lavallee’s 2017 Polish-language book, it concentrates on translation and reception, mainly dealing with Protestant polemicists and Jesuit translators.

The opening chapter focuses on that ubiquitous British reformation author, John Foxe. In the late sixteenth century, Cyprian Bazylik made a partial translation of Foxe’s works, compiling them from different texts and focussing on stories of martyrs closest to his time period; meaning that those executed under Mary i received more attention than those under Henry viii or from amongst the lollards. Generally, Bazylik’s text reduced the doctrinal elements of Foxe’s work but maintained the spiritual parts, the author intending it to be an edifying text for the Commonwealth’s Protestant communities, though Hanusiewicz-Lavallee notes there is little evidence about the work’s reception.

In contrast, the second chapter examines Catholic – particularly Jesuit – tales of English persecution, this time with the design of sharpening confessional identities in the religiously pluralistic Commonwealth. The Jesuit Piotr Skarga was a major figure in efforts to forge a Catholic Reformation identity in the Commonwealth, summarising – rather than fully translating – the works of Nicholas Sanders and Nicholas Harpsfield in his book on martyrs. Hanusiewicz-Lavallee argues that such works were designed to stimulate compassion for England’s Catholics, but also – and more importantly – acted as a warning against, rather than an appeal for, religious toleration, cautioning what could happen if Protestants gained an ascendancy. In this, she builds on the work of the likes of Clarinda Calma and Gerard Kilroy, particularly when examining the influence in the Commonwealth of Edmund Campion’s Rationes decem.

Whereas the second chapter focuses on several authors, those following highlight single British writers. The first considered is the Scottish humanist and later Presbyterian George Buchanan. After providing a short overview of his life, including his stay in Paris at the same time as Ignatius of Loyola, Hanusiewicz-Lavallee suggests that Buchanan’s paraphrases of the Psalms were particularly widely read in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Owing to the fluid nature of religious identity in the region in the sixteenth century, Catholics also made use of Buchanan’s paraphrases, and it was a translation by one of these, the poet Jan Kochanowski, that ensured its impact in the region. Though he flirted with the ideas of the reformers, Kochanowski never actually left the Catholic Church, but it is thanks to him that Buchanan’s paraphrases became universal poetry within the Commonwealth, used to unite rather than divide, combining classical and biblical traditions.

When it came to politics, the Commonwealth’s readers instead looked to the works of the neo-Latin poet John Barclay. Born in France, his father a Scottish exile, Barclay went to London and the court of James i, rather oddly for a Catholic helping the monarch translate and spread round the courts of Europe his defence of the Oath of Allegiance. He later repented for this after moving to Rome in 1616. Yet it was this idiosyncratic approach that defined Barclay, his belief in royal power meaning he wrote witheringly of the political system and multidenominational character of the Commonwealth in Icon animorum, the fourth part of his novel, Satyricon. Whereas scholars have previously focused on the tumult caused by the work’s unflattering depiction of Poles, Hanusiewicz-Lavallee argues that it was nevertheless widely read. Perhaps most interestingly, she includes the response of the Jesuit-connected Łukasz Opaliński, who pointedly asked why, if the Poles were that bad, did so many Catholic exiles from Scotland venture there in the reformation period. Barclay’s allegorical political romance, Argenis (1621) was also adapted, this time by Wacław Potocki. For Potocki, Barclay’s vision of an absolutist utopia proposed a remedy to the slow collapse of the Commonwealth and its elective monarchy in the second half of the seventeenth century, Hanusiewicz-Lavallee arguing this shows broader geographical interest in such absolutist ideas.

The focus of the next chapter is the Welshman John Owen, the continental reception of whose Latin epigrams are usually considered only within Protestant dissenting gymnasia. Rather than repeat this research, Hanusiewicz-Lavallee instead highlights their presence in the Commonwealth’s Jesuit colleges. Translations and paraphrases into Polish were also produced, largely for teaching rhetoric in schools, with Hanusiewicz-Lavallee identifying versions of about ninety of Owen’s epigrams into Polish.

Shifting to the eighteenth century in the last two chapters, the first focuses on two editions of Nicholas Sanders’s De origine, which were both published in 1748. One was a near direct translation by an anonymous Jesuit for the purpose of teaching history in the Society’s colleges, emphasising the historical aspects of Sanders’s work rather than the martyrological. The second was more of a compilation or derivative, using Sanders as a principal source but taking the story up to the then-present, including the Hanoverian dynasty and the start of George ii’s reign. Authored by the Jesuit Jan Poszakowski, it too had educational intent, but was also polemical, taking on the views of the likes of Gilbert Burnet. Yet for Hanusiewicz-Lavallee, it was the context that really mattered, Poszakowski consciously plugging into the revived Catholicisation of the Commonwealth, with Protestants increasingly suspected to be an enemy within.

The final chapter considers how that Protestant minority in the eighteenth century translated John Bunyan’s The pilgrim’s progress, the first part published in 1764 and the second in 1775, both in Königsburg. At the time, the Commonwealth was experiencing a wave of Anglophilia and the translation was unusual, of an English vernacular work (albeit a relay translation from French through German printers) rather than a Latin text.

Taken as a whole, the chapters of The call of Albion may appear a fairly disparate collection, but they do support Hanusiewicz-Lavallee’s central argument that the decisions taken by translators and publishers in the Commonwealth were not based on the aesthetic qualities of their selected British works, but on their usefulness in shaping religious attitudes and identities. This engagement with British literature reached a high point in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as the Commonwealth’s policy of religious pluralism came under increasing strain. Though Hanusiewicz-Lavallee does at times allude to it, and the book is already a substantial work, another angle on this confessionalisation might have been to explore further how it connects with the forging of transnational religious identities. Yet, overall, this is a useful addition to the growing canon of work showing that the British reformations had a wide impact in continental Europe.