“May every lover of truth find it through reading.” Manners of Authenticating the Message in Sixteenth-Century Accounts of Polish Religious Disputations

In the 16th and 17th centuries, religious disputations became one of the means of conducting religious agitation. Texts providing an account of the course of such events confirm the application of the formal rules of school-type disputatio in public disputes using vernacular language. This undoubtedly resulted in the expansion of the audience at such spectacles beyond scholars conversant in Latin and influenced the change of the objectives of such debates, from a collective search for the truth to the defence of one’s own doctrine using all available methods, that is, dialectics and rhetoric.

Unlike mediaeval scholastic disputations, public disputes no longer engaged an arbiter to settle them. The victory was decided by the very course of the dialectic confrontation. As a matter of fact. The lack of an authoritative arbiter encouraged each of the parties involved to assure the public that they had won and therefore that their religious statements were true. After such a confrontation, ostensibly impartial and true accounts of the course of the dispute were published in print. This paper presents an analysis of eight prints providing detailed descriptions of six religious debates conducted in Polish between 1581—1599. These texts reaffirm the conviction (inherited from the Middle Ages) that the truth may be learnt through disputatio. They explicitly express the belief in the readers’ ability to individually assess the correctness of the arguments formulated and the counterarguments, and consequently to understand who is right. At the same time, noticeable techniques employed to authenticate the accounts as impartial and true dispiteously undermine
the objectivity of the accounts that profess to be true. The discursive means employed to direct the reader in his reception of the conveyed message include a declaration of an ethical urge to proclaim the truth about the course of the debate and its winners, and concealment of the true authorship of the text with the aim of avoiding a charge of partiality, assuring that the account follows the pattern of the so-called autentyki (or originals), that is notes written down during the dispute.

Poeta laureatus Stefan Jaworski and Emblematics

The aim of the paper is to present and analyze emblematic icons in the Polish-language works of Stefan Jaworski (1658—1722) with regard to the reception of rhetoric and emblematics in the Kiev-Mohyla Academy milieu. The considerations are divided into four parts.

1. Biography and studies. Jaworski received his education first in the trilingual Kiev-Mohyla Collegium (where he became familiar with the rhetorical system of writing verse), and then at universities in Lublin, Poznań and Vilnius. His learning was based on the Jesuit school model of Ratio studiorum. In these schools, Jaworski perfected his proficiency in Polish and Latin, broadening his knowledge in rhetoric, poetics, philosophy, theology, homiletics and emblematics.

2. The analysis of emblematic works and practices. In the years 1684—1691, four panegyric works were created by Jaworski. The first one (Hercules post Atlantem infracto virtutum robore honorarium pondus sustinens…, Czernihów c. 1684) contains no emblems and is only briefly described in the paper. Emblems and coats of arms appear in Jaworski’s subsequent panegyrics: Echo głosu wołającego na puszczy od serdecznej refleksyi pochodzące a przy solennym powinszowaniu … Janowi Mazepie hetmanowi wojsk… (The Echo of a Voice of One Calling in the Wilderness, Coming From Heartfelt Refl ection and Accompanied by Solemn Felicitation … to Ivan Mazepa…, Hetman), Kiev 1689; Arctos et antarctos caeli Rossiaci in gentilibus syderibus…, Kiev 1690; Pełnia nieubywającej chwały w  herbowym księżycu z trzech primae magnitudinis luminarzow, Barłaama świętego pustelnika, Barłaama świętego męczennika, Barłaama świętego pieczarskiego… (The Plenitude of Inexhaustible Glory in the Heraldic Moon From Three Luminaries Primae Magnitudinis, Barlaam the Saint Hermit, Barlaam the Saint Martyr, Barlaam the Saint of Pechersk), Kiev 1691. In 2018, these works were made available by the website http://polishemblems.uw.edu.pl/index.php/pl/news/69-stefan-jaworski-i-emblematyka. In Jaworski’s panegyrics, two innovative models of emblematic practice can be distinguished: (a) creating new emblems through the projection of iconographic signs from the Mazepa coat of arms onto emblems from Saavedra’s collection in Echo głosu…, and through the transfiguration of Jasiński’s coat of arms in Arctos et antarctos…; (b) the construction of emblematic combinations out of motifs from Western European emblem books (Pietrosancta) in the panegyric Pełnia nieubywającej chwały…

3. Emblematic practice versus the theory of the emblem. This part is devoted to the question of how Jaworski’s emblematic practice can be understood in relation to late-Baroque emblematic theory. Although terms such as emblema, hieroglyphicum and symbolum can be found in Jaworski’s rhetoric Риторическая рука, they lack appropriate definition. They are named interchangeably in the part of inventio, and used as visual tropes in speech or verse writing as well as devices of the art of memory (ars memorativa). After an analysis of his emblematic practice, one can conclude that Jaworski—like Pontanus—preferred a tripartite construction of his pictorial-verbal combinations (emblema triplex: inscriptio, pictura, subscriptio). However, he would introduce not one but several inscriptions to his  emblems (see Echo głosu…) and extend the subscription to epic proportions in all of his panegyrics. An overview of the definition of the emblem in Ukrainian rhetoric books confirms that Jaworski relied on a definition by the Jesuit Jacob Masen (Speculum imaginum  veritatis occultae), for whom emblema, symbolum, hieroglyphicum et aenigma were subordinate to the term imagines figuratae.

4. Concluding remarks. Jaworski’s last two (Latin) texts: the elegy of the library, and the epigram in his last will (1721) can be treated as a summary of his emblematic thought and his explanation of intradiegetic signs.

translated by Aleksandra Paszkowska

Orator—rhetor—rhetorista According to Johann Mochinger. An Edition and Translation of Three Chapters Dedicated to a Public Speaker, Theorist and Student/Critic of the Art of Eloquence in Orator atque rhetorista

Johann Mochinger (1603—1652), professor of rhetoric at the Academic Gymnasium in Gdańsk (1630—1652), was one of the most interesting teachers and theorists of rhetoric in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the fi rst half of the seventeenth century. While during the Thirty Years’ War the  Protestant teaching of rhetoric was often involved in religious disputations and controversies, Mochinger, though he was at the same time a preacher at the Lutheran Church of St. Catherine, plainly quoted many Jesuit treatises appreciating them as valuable sources of rhetoric theory both in his printed treatise, Floridorum e dissertationibus rhetoricis super Cicerone sylva (Gdańsk 1640) and Orator atque rhetorista (Gdańsk 1641), and in his manuscript lectures.

The aim of the paper is to present three chapters of Orator atque rhetorista by the Mochinger, the most important of his rhetoric works, in the Latin original and my Polish translation. All these chapters, dedicated to the terms related to orator (public speaker), rhetor (theorist/teacher of rhetoric) and rhetorista (advanced student and critic of the art of eloquence), well exemplify Mochinger’s sources: Cicero’s De oratore, Noctes Atticae by Aulus Gellius, Dialogus de oratoribus by Tacitus, Plutarch’s De garrulitate and Vitae decem oratorum attributed to him, as well as commentaries by Petrus Mosellanus, the oration Ad studiosos eloquentiae in Academia Wittebergensi by the Lutheran Adam Theodor Siber, and Theatrum veterum rhetorum by the Jesuit Louis de Cressolles, De eloquentia sacra et humana by another Jesuit, Nicolas Caussin, and Prolusiones academicae by Famiano Strada. However, the new meaning of the word rhetorista and the broad application of it in his work are Mochinger’s original invention. Not only did he devote a significant part of his treatise to define the term and to describe the duties of a rhetorista, but he also willingly used it in his later works, e.g. in Eloquentiae cupidissimos rhetoristas ad acroases oratorias frequenter iterum obeundas, quae (quod optimum maximum Numen iubeat!) auspicato rursus inchoabuntur, posteaquam quidem, solito in Acroaterio Minori Lycei nostri, die Martii I. hora sueta IXa, de librorum Tullianorum quam maxime utiliter evolvendorum ratione multo commodissima, quasi in antecessum … vocoque invitoque… (Gdańsk 1646).