Not long after Olesnicki had defied the
authority of Rome and removed the images from the church and the monks
from the monastery in his town of Pinczów (1550), he took steps to
establish a school in the abandoned cloister ; for education was then t
a low ebb in Poland. The University of
Kraków . . . no longer attracted able scholars to its faculty, nor could it
long hold active-minded students ; while the numerous local schools had
such inferior teachers that the sons of the nobility were forced to
resort to foreign lands for a satisfactory education. Especially was this
the case with those that favored the
Reformation.1 Hence, not only for the education of the young nobles,
but also for the training of their own ministers, it became a matter of
much importance to them to have schools of their own to take the place
of those of the church on which they had hitherto depended.2 Thus a gymnasium was established at
Pinczów as early as 1551 ; and as soon as the Reformed Churhc had
completed its own organization its development was rapid and its fame
spread. Pinczów became a centre of learning, and religious exiles
from Italy, taking advantage of the generous privileges offered those
that were suffering for conscience'
sake,3 flocked thither in such numbers than an Italian church was ere
long organized, with Giorgio Negri as its
minister.4 It was here that the scholars gathered who made the
first Protestant translation of the Bible into Polish, here that the
first Protestant press in Poland was set up in 1558, and here that the
early synods of the Reformed Churhc were most often held. Thus
Pinczów, besides being for some twenty
years the metropolis of the Polish Reformation, presently came to be
called 'the Sarmatian Athens.'5
Not long after his returnto Polad, Lismanino wrote Calvin urging his
as soon as possible to send Peter Statorius to assist in the work of
the new school.6 Statorius was a
zealous French Protestant of arked ability, who had been a pupil of Beza
at Lausanne, and was well known to Lismanino at Zürich. He arrived
in Poland later in the year, going first to Kraków as minister,
and not long afterwards to Pinczów as assistant teacher in the
new gymnasium. Results were soon apparent, and the growth of the school
was so strking as to alarm the Catholics, so that in two successive
years their synods demanded of the King to close
it.7 A second French scholar was added to its teachers in
1558, in the person of Jean Thénaud of Bourges, and Statorius
soon set about reforming the plan of the school, upon the model of that at
Lausanne8 It thus became the
first humanistic gymansium in Poland, and its fame spread abroad.
Statorius, who in due time acquired so fluent a knowledge of the language
that he became one of the translators of the Bible into
Polish,9 and even published the first Polish
grammar,10 was made Rector of the
school in 1561, and gave his name a Polish turn as Sojenski (Stoinski �
Stoinius).
The Pinczów school existed for about twenty years, and under
Statorius's influence became the first 'Arian' school in Poland, while
Pinczów itself was for a time the focus of the antitrinitarian
novement in the Reformed Church. Statorius is said to have been already
secretly
a follower of Servetus when he came to Poland, and to have brought Servetus's works
with him,11 though some time
elapsed before heresy was suspected of him ; (etc).
1 cf. Stanisław Kot, 'Pierwsza Szkoła Protestancka w Polsce' (The first Protestant school in Poland), Reformacja w Polsce, i (1921), 15-34.
2 cf. Lasciana, p. 234.
3 cf. Theodor Wotschke, Briefwechsel, p. 97.
4 cf. Lasciana, p. 464. Giorgio was son of the Francesco Negri whom we have met in the Grisons. cf. p. 106 f, supra.
5 Lubieniecius, Historia, p. 33.
6 Lismanino to Calvin, April 15, 1556, Calvin, xvi, 108. He describes himself as 'Petrus Statorius Gallus [etc]' [A 'puzzle' mentioned, here omitted. — (WPT)]
7 Bukowski, Reformacya, ii, 404. 457.
8 cf. his Gymnasii Pinczoviensis Institutio, c. 1560 ; also Kraków 1912, ed. A. Karbowiak ; Józef Łukaszewicz, Historya Szkół w Koronie i w Ksiestwie Litewskiem (History of schools in the Kingdom and in the Duchy of Lithuania), Poznan, 1849-'53.
9 Statorius to Calvin, Feb. 1, 1559, Calvin, xvii, 426.
10 P. Stojenski, Polonicae grammatices institutio (Cracoviae, 1568), written in Latin for the use of immigrants. It is interesting to note also that the first Polish dictionary also was the work of one of the early adherents of the 'Arian' movement : Jan Maczinski, Lexicon latino-polonicum, (Regiomonti, 1563).
11 Lubieniecius, Historia, p. 148.
(pages 294-296)
His son Peter . . . became a distinguished minister and writer in the Minor Church, pastor at Lucławice, and beloved disciple of Faustus Socinus. For bravery in war two of the children of the elder Statorius were ennobled by Sigismund III in 1591 with the cognomen Stojenski (Stoinski, Stoinius.). cf. Kot, Szkoła, p. 34, n. 4.
(page 297 note 19)