Krzysztof Obremski

The Warsaw Confederation, Piotr Skarga SJ, and Hate Speech
The discourse involving the feeling of hate is understood here rather as a soft than a hard “discourse of hate”. The Warsaw Confederation called “a jewel of a free conscience” was hated (more or less) by the contemporary elite of the Church. The subjects of analysis in this paper are two booklets by Piotr Skarga (Upominanie do ewanjelików i do wszystkich społem niekatolików iż o skażenie zborów krakowskich gniewać się i nic nowego i burzliwego zaczynać nie mają [An Admonition to Protestants and to all other non-Catholics], Kraków 1591; Dyskurs na konfederacyją – [A Discourse on Confederation], Kraków 1607) and Protestant responses to them.
The fundamental question is: can “the discourse of hatred”, i.e. “a concept of multiple meanings (...), involved in political and philosophical disputes, so typical for the beginning of the 21st century”, be used as a way of analysing and interpretating texts written 400 years ago? Such an indisputable argument as the title of the book by Wacław Sobieski published already 100 years ago: Nienawiść wyznaniowa tłumów za rządów Zygmunta III-go [The religious hate of crowds during the reign of Sigismund III] supports an affirmative answer to it.
In a kind of “hierarchy of beliefs” in Skarga’s argument Protestants are ascribed to the lowest and exceptionally godless place and described by comparisons: 1. with adulterers, thieves and parricides (Protestants are equal to them) and 2. with pagans and Jews (Protestants are perhaps even worse than them). Th e purpose of such an argumentation is severe condemnation of the Protestant godlessness since the Catholic love towards God evokes hate towards people who – like Protestants – turned away from Him. So, on the one hand, Skarga admits that Protestants are still Christians, but on the other, he claims there is no God outside his, i.e. Catholic, church.

Polish Literary Studies: the Crisis versus Bureaucratic Vitality (Cyril Northcote Parkinson’s Law of “the Rising Pyramid”)

“The literature holds on firmly! And the literary science with it!” These are the first two sentences of the Adam F. Kola’s article ANT-ologia literatury (“Przegląd Kulturoznawczy” 2013, no. 1, p. 35). However, on could argue about the dependence on literature apparently innate to the literary science and the directly proportional relationship between them: the stronger is the first one, the stronger is the second. The literary science became on a large scale independent from the literature and its power derives from its bureaucratic status. Cyril Northcote Parkinson (“the rising pyramid” of bureaucracy) allows us to see the institutional foundation of the literary science independent from the literature.

 

About ,,Women, Canon and Research of the Ancient Literature"

The interpretation, according to which Transakcyja... by Anna Stanisławska is an object of male ignorance, is debatable in two ways: first, in my opinion, there is no poetic artistry in this poem whatsoever. Also, I would like to mention that we should differentiate between two levels of competence in old-Polish literature: a didactic one and a research-analytic one. It is utterly unbelievable that academic lists of readings could pass in silence such authors as Stanisław Orzechowski, Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski, Stanisław Herakliusz Lubomirski or Wespazjan Kochowski. Both “The Canon” and “the canon” in their genesis belong to the ancient times and depend on the process of shaping the corpus of texts called the Holly Scripture and therefore appear to be culturally anachronic.

Reformacja w Toruniu. Wpływ kultury ewangelickiej na rozwój miasta. Katalog wystawy w Muzeum Okręgowym w Toruniu 9 czerwca – 15 października 2017, redakcja katalogu: J. Arszyńska, L. Lewandowska, A. Mierzejewska, Toruń 2017.

Rec.: Jakub Bohuszewicz, Od opętania do rytuału. Pojęcie i praktyka transu w kultach vodun i katolicyzmie, „Jagiellońskie Monografie Religioznawcze”, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, Kraków 2017, ss. 276.