JOHN OF SCHWENKENFELD: DOMINICAN INQUISITOR-MARTYR AND HIS CULT.

The article is intended, on the one hand, to reconstruct the biography of John of Schwenkenfeld, a Dominican theologian, lector and prior at the Świdnica monastery, as well as a papal inquisitor in the dioceses of Wrocław and Lubusz, and on the other hand, to analyse the post mortem cult of the friar preacher, who was murdered in 1341. In recent years, thanks to new research on the papal inquisition in Silesia and the Silesian Dominican friaries, new information has emerged on John of Schwenkenfeld, his background, career, education and inquisition activities. They have shed light on this Dominican inquisitor, who in the second and third decades of the fourteenth century was one of the best educated and most influential friars of the Polish Dominican province. Schwenkenfeld's training and his excellent grasp of theological controversies of his days are evidenced by the testimonies he gathered during the 1332 interrogations of the Świdnica Beguines. John of Schwenkenfeld was the second papal inquisitor active in the diocese of Wrocław from 1330. In his inquisitorial activities, he worked closely with Bishop Nanker of Wrocław, whom he firmly supported in the conflict with the city council of Wrocław. It was this conflict that became the immediate cause of his death when, in early September 1341, he appeared in Prague to testify in an arbitration trial before King John of Luxembourg of Bohemia. The article reexamines the circumstances of Schwenkenfeld's murder at Prague's Dominican friary of St Clement. His assassination, commissioned by the councillors of Wrocław, gave impetus to the development of a posthumous cult. The inquisitor's body was brought from Prague to Wrocław, and his grave in one of the chapels of St Adalbert's Church became a shrine visited by pilgrims. Shortly after Schewnkenfeld's death, Polish Dominicans made attempts to canonize him. Developing the cult of Schwenkenfeld, traces of which are visible in sources from the second half of the fourteenth century, he was portrayed as a saintly inquisitor and martyr. New attempts to revive the cult of Schwenkenfeld were made in the second half of the sixteenth century, but scanty information about his life and death available to Dominican hagiographers produced distorted accounts, in which the circumstances of his murder were mischaracterized. Despite the lack of formal recognition of Schwenkenfeld's cult by the Holy See, for a very long time Polish Dominicans have preserved the memory of the Silesian inquisitor, who died a martyr's death in the service of the Church, first of all thanks to the hagiographic and historiographical works of Abraham Bzovius. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]