By analysing the Horatian mask of kritikos (Lat. iudex), as portrayed in the “Epistula ad Pisones” (“Epistle to the Pisos”), in the sociological perspective, the article covers the literary critic’s strategy of establishing one’s authority and finding a place in the social hierarchy. Considering the dual nature of “De arte poetica” (“The Art of Poetry”)—as a didactic and poetic work—the author regards the literary theory and history, expressed directly, functionally as important as the metapoetic elements, especially focused around the subject’s structure. Iudex, as a non-creator, like protean figure appears in the role of father, client-teacher, poet, philosopher, and friend of the creator. With each successive role, he gains a part of the authority that legitimates his judgments. This process allows to highlight the particular relationship that links the subject-critic of “De arte poetica” with the adept of poetic art.

The subject of the article is an interpretation of selected mediaeval songs by women authors composing in Occitan (the trobairitz) with the contemporary tools of the metre, rhythm, and versification that belong to the research field of somatic criticism. Court woman poetry in the Middle Ages is built on the fundamental tension between the sociopoetic convention of courtly love and a desire for authentic love. With regard to highly formal character of the female troubadour lyric, it proves critical to resort to the methodologies that provide for research of the body in the text, which allows to place the literary authoress’ personality in this continuum.

The article offers an overview of the poetical material circulating in a Latin poem by Rudolph of Wasserburg which was inserted into an astronomical and geographical treatise “Introductio in Ptolemaei Cosmographiam cum longitudinibus et latitudinibus regionum et civitatum celebriorum” (Cracoviae 1512, 1517) of Jan of Stobnica (1470–1530). As a Sapphic verse, Rudolph’s poem offers tales of the achievements of Jan Lubrański, the Bishop of Poznań, which were praised and admired in order to meet the tastes and cultural expectations of contemporary readers, thus becoming a testimony to the bishop’s outstanding personality. Among others, the article examines his actions and deeds eulogised in the poem, such as building churches and patronage of the arts.

“Fortunatus” was first published (anonymously by Johann Otamar) in Augsburg in the year 1509, and in the second part of the 16th c. in the translation of Marcin Siennik who used the Frankfurt’s 1564 edition. “Fortunatus” was a bestseller and one of the most widely read romance of its times.

In the context of the Polish scanty and incomprehensive research to this day, and first and foremost the German multifaceted and varied approaches, the author of the paper challenges the interpretative stances of “Fortunatus” as well as the points of Jurij Striedter made in his work “Der polnische »Fortunatus« und seine deutsche Vorlage” (“The Polish »Fortunatus« and Its German Edition”), to this day the basic study for the research in the translation.

Fictionality of the text, and also its various narrative techniques and conventions, offer interpretative diversity, each time accentuating a given aspect of the adopted convention. “Fortunatus” is an individual transformation into peculiar novelistic entity of the available in the German-language bookseller print circulation and information collection carried by the vernacular texts. It is a novel and distinctive quality. In the literature on the piece, attention is paid to the fact that it lacks a unified axiological (and interpretative) system, that the narrative is set in the context of the world of aristocratic values, in chivalry code with its symbolic representation, and the world of middle-class, early-capitalist civilisation with pecuniary exchange significance.

“Epitafijum Hannie Kochanowskiej” (“Epitaph for Hanna Kochanowska”) preserves its double status: though it does not belong to “Treny” (“Laments”), the piece feedbacks it and sheds such light on it that changes its meaning. What is meant is that the epitaph dedicated to Hanna allows to challenge the “conforming” significance of the cycle. Rationalisation of the father’s second tragedy verbalised by the epitaph is a condensed manifesto of a passive stance: from this moment Kochanowski will conceive of his earthly life only as a passive struggle leading to death. Return to despair is linked with its lifelong experience.

Destructive reinterpretation of “Treny” (“Laments”) was immanently formulated by Kochanowski himself, though to this day researchers have unnoticed by. Why? Because it ultimately denied the optimistic significance of the cycle read intrinsically and at the same time perceived as isolated from its epitaphial complement.

Struggles with the Tatars who plundered Poland were a real problem for the authorities of the Old Polish Republic. This issue proves to be well mirrored in old-Polish memoirs. Many memoir writers (Jan Florian Drobysz Tuszyński, Stanisław Druszkiewicz, Mikołaj Jemiołowski, Joachim Jerlicz, Samuel Maskiewicz, Jan Zbigniew Ossoliński, Kazimierz Sarnecki) described the subject of Turkish captivity as severe for the Polish nation as regards the political, economic, demographic, and national pride. Among the numerous observations linked to Turkish and Tatar captivity, the diarists uttered remarks on the liberation from slavery. They listed the following solutions to effectuate it, namely military actions to openly confront the oppressor, a buyup (by relatives, strangers, or as an act of charity), prisoner swaps, or release based on treaties concluded immediately after the fight. Besides, envoys sent to the Sublime Porte actively participated in prisoner deliverance.

The study challenges the statement that Stanisław Herakliusz Lubomirski’s “Eklezjastes” (“Ecclesiastes”), a poetic translation of “Ecclesiastes”, is effectuated from Jakub Wujek’s translation of the Bible. The author of the paper suggests that Lubomirski’s paraphrase was based on the Vulgate. To prove it, he carries out a translatological analysis of fragments from “Eklezjaste”s treated in the literature as evidence for the text’s dependency on Wujek’s translation (Arguments 1–8) and lists factors that conform Lubomirski’s work on the Latin text (Arguments 9–12).

The paper attempts at describing the category of rhetorical ornamentation (ornatus) in the textbooks of eloquence by three 17th c. Jesuits: Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski (1595–1640), Zygmunt Lauksmin (1596–1670), and Jan Kwiatkiewicz (1629–1703). Ancient rhetoric teachers linked it with many linguistic forms known under the names of various tropes and figures. Broadly understood figuration became its main determinant. A comparison of the modes of describing this category in the three textbooks, the authors of which were inspired by Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian, allows to expound the changes in thinking about ornamentation and transformations that Ciceronianism unterwent in early-modern theory and oratorical practice. Opening to new stylistic inspiration was accompanied by concern for brilliance of expression. The most commonly used rhetorical devices were allegory, metaphor, antithesis, periphrasis, and antonomasia.

The paper reveals that the immediate cause of including “Dialog mistrza Polikarpa ze Śmiercią” (“Master Polikarp’s Dialogue with Death”) in 1542 in the print “Śmierci z mistrzem dwojakie gadania” (“Death’s Two Dialogues with the Master”) was a plague epidemic that then spread over the Greater Poland region and reached Cracow the following year. The epidemic was the most severe of all that attacked Poland in the 15th and 16th c. The Cracow printers issued at that time numerous mortuary prints and within this framework they also reminded of the mediaeval dialogue. The author of the paper also pays attention to two readers of this volume: Mikołaj Rej, who, influenced by it, composed his “Kupiec” (“Merchant”, 1549), and Paweł Simplicjan, that in his “Manele duchowne” (“Spiritual Matters”, 1601) in extenso quoted a piece of a skull from “Śmierci z mistrzem dwojakie gadania”. Simplicjan’s publication is here linked with a 1542 edition which also incorporates the same image of Death.

The paper discusses a few places from “Żywot Ezopa” (“The Life of Aesop the Phrygian”) by Biernat of Lublin. To achieve a better understanding or even correcting the piece under scrutiny, the author compares it with its Greek original and, first and foremost, with Rinuccio’s Latin translation, and also takes into consideration the German translation (by Steinhöwel) and the Czech one (by Vrchbělský).

Bibliographical information about Jan Dzwonowski (Jan of Kijany) excerpted from his output and confronted with archive sources allow to arrive to certain conclusions. The poet came from the village of Dzwonów situated in the then Pilzno poviat. It can be assumed that he was educated at the school of All Saints Church in Cracow. Unquestionably, the creator of plebeian poetry from the beginning of the 1590s was an organist of the parish Saint Cross Church in Brzostek (now Dębica poviat, Subcarpatian voivodeship). Jan of Kijany was the first to play the regal, and then the new organs bought before the year 1608 to the church in Brzostek. Most probably it was here that he started his family and lived with his children in a house near the market square and cultivated a field of two roods. Many arguments confirm that he died between 1622 and 1625 during the plague that wasted the town.

The paper discusses Daniel Naborowski’s recently found poem composed to commemorate a German surgeon Wilhelm Fabricius Hildanus and their to this day unknown correspondence (Naborowski’s letter dated July 27th, 1613, and Hildanus’ two letters dated January 12th, 1614, and March 20th, 1614). The author of the article reconstructs the course of the poet’s friendship (and his patron Janusz I Radziwiłł) with the German medic as based on the correspondence published by Hildanus in the collection “Observationum et curationum chirurgicarum centuriae”. Naborowski’s letter also brings new information about the battle of Guzów waged during Zebrzydowski’s rebellion.

The article takes up the issue of the enigmatic word “buzyra” present in Samuel Twardowski’s “Dafnis drzewem bobkowym” (“Daphne Transformed into a Laurel Tree”, 1638). Allowing for the contexts of the baroque poet’s output that were absent from the research to this day as well as for a fragment of “Institutio principis Christiani” (“The Education of a Christian Prince”) by Desiderius Erasmus—the piece that mentions the tyrant Busiris, the author of the paper proves that the word refers to a wild beast and is a part of Twardowski’s poetic language. A similar usage is found in a piece by Adrian Wieszczycki. Referring to late output, the author settles that the form “Buzyr” became in the second half of the 17th century Polish language, possibly influenced by Twardowski, also an alternant form of the ancient tyrant’s name (found also at the beginning of the 19th century). The two words, however, differ in grammatical gender: “buzyra” is a common feminine noun, while “Buzyr” is a masculine proper noun.

The article contains an edition of “Duma kozacka o wojnie z Kozakami” (“Cossack Elegy on a War with the Cossacks”), a piece in the Ruthenian language, referring to the Battle of Berestechko, preserved in a unique 1651 print, here preceded by a literary-historical foreword. The piece, published to this date only in transliteration and almost absent from the Polish subject matter, stands out above fragments of preserved Ruthenian pieces printed in Latin characters in its completeness, and is viewed as the only so comprehensive occasional account from the times of the Cossack Wars. An analysis of the content and eliciting the song structure of the verse makes it possible to categorise it into the Jesuit propaganda prints issued in Ukraine in order to strengthen the position of the Uniate Church and the Society of Jesus itself whose activity in the time of the the Khmelnytsky Uprising was markedly limited. The presented edition is a proposal to employ unified rules of transcription for modern texts in Ruthenian printed in Latin alphabet.

The article aims to present the contamination degree of Jakub Sobieski’s funeral speeches contained in Jan Stefan Pisarski’s “Mówca polski” (“Polish Speaker”) (Kalisz 1668). Argumentation is based on the evidence gathered while working on the critical edition of Sobieski’s speeches. Pisarski’s anthology is reconstructed with the stemmatic analysis, and its place in the tradition of funeral orations is secondary since the accounts contain numerous mistakes inherited after the predecessors and also its own (omissions of words, phrases, and even entire fragments, shifts of words), leading to distortion of the stylistic and fact-collecting layer, hardly observable while reading.

The paper presents an unknown manuscript of “Nowe niebo duchowne […]” (“New Spiritual Heaven […]”) ascribed to Tomasz Nargielewicz OP, disregarding the inspection of the piece. The essential part of the article consists of a description of the regained relic and a comparison of the work—the manuscript and the codex where it was recorded—with Nargielewicz’s output. The analyses allow to settle the author of “New Spiritual Heaven […]” and to suggest new hypotheses about the circumstances of Nargielewicz’s works composition.

In the initial part of the paper, the author revises the state of research in Sebastian Fabian Klonowic’s poem “Victoria deorum” to this day, taking into consideration the issue of nobility, the allegorical nature of the piece, its literary genetic and thematic qualification, affinity for Old-Polish paraenetic literature, explanation of the title, the role of mythological context, social problems, construction of the work, printing history as well as ancient and modern sources of erudition. Next, he describes the history of translations of the piece (both those that remain in manuscripts and fragments printed in research papers), mentions partial Latin editions of the work and quotes fragments of scholars’ translations. He also informs about a discovery of a translation, regarded as lost, by Jacek Idzi Przybylski, characterises its manuscript found in the collection of Ambroży Grabowski, deposited in the National Archive in Cracow, and follows to consider the reasons why Przybylski stopped his translation and Grabowski failed to publish the work of his friend.

The reviewer enters into polemics with the theses of Andrzej Tadeusz Staniszewski’s book „Historyje krakowskie. Funkcjonowanie narracyjnych tekstów popularnych we wczesnonowożytnej aglomeracji krakowskiej” („Cracow Stories: The Functioning of the Popular Narrative Literature in the Early Modern Cracow”, 2020) and convinces, against Staniszewski’s statements, that popular narrative literature which entered the Polish literary circulation in the 16th century was reissued in the following century. Scanty copiers that remained until now and especially booksellers’ inventories the significance of which Staniszewski diminished are made evidence of the reviewer’s stance.

The book “W stronę Albionu” (“Towards Albion”) by Mirosława Hanusiewicz-Lavallee is an in-depth, richly documented monograph of the matters specified in its title and formulated within the framework of two kinds of comparative studies: literary genetic and typological. The former brings a collection of noteworthy examinations and settlements of historical background, channels of transmission, authorship, bases of translation, translation techniques, and editions. The latter, by contrast, opens a space for masterly interpretations of Polish Baroque poetry in the context of English metaphysical poetry.