Rammohun Roy, Thomas Jefferson, and the Bible

Abstract

The Unitarian movement was always a transnational phenomenon. In Reformation Europe, anti-Trinitarians could be found in Italian and Swiss territories, Spain, Poland, Transylvania, Holland, Britain, and elsewhere. Persecution, the printing press, and the circulation of people and texts aided the dispersal of heterodoxy. A case in point is Socinianism. The Inquisition drove dissident Italians north of the Alps. One refugee was Faustus Socinus (1539–1604),¹ who resided in Lyon, Basel, and Transylvania before settling in Krakow. In each place Socinus associated with like-minded individuals, and in Poland he and local anti-Trinitarians forged the doctrines that bear his name. Socinianism flourished in seventeenth-century Poland until the Counter-Reformation silenced or dispersed adherents to Transylvania, Holland, and East Prussia. During its heyday in Rakow, the Polish movement attracted heterodox individuals from Germany and dispatched emissaries to other regions. They also printed a series of heterodox works, including the Racovian Catechism (1605), which was reissued in multiple translations in the ensuing decades.