Ars amandi, ars dictandi — Medieval Pseudo-Ars amatoria and Its Didactic Functions at Cracow University

This paper presents the reception of the medieval didactic poem known as Pseudo-Ars amatoria in the environment of Cracow University. The poem, attributed to Ovid, was most probably written in the 12th century. Three of the codices that include the text are stored in the Jagiellonian Library (BJ 2035, 2115, 2233). Due to the unquestionable fact that the manuscripts were used in the academia, the purpose of the study is to determine the role that Pseudo-Ars amatoria had in the teaching process at Cracow University.
Previous research was devoted to preparing the text’s critical edition and pointing out the relationship with amour courtois and the oeuvre of Ovid. Considering the assumptions of Jaussian reception theory, the paper reconstructs the spectrum of reading experiences based on manuscript testimonials that refer to the two above  entioned hypotexts. The main part of the study therefore consists of three chapters. The first one discusses the courtly love motifs present in the work. Based the concept of Peter Allen (The Art of Love: Amatory Fiction from Ovid to the ‘Romance of the Rose’), which emphasizes the primary literary dimension of amour courtois, the author stresses the didactic potential of medieval love textbooks. The second chapter is devoted to the medieval reception of Ovid’s Ars amatoria, which is imitated in the anonymous work in question, and the intertextual connections noticeable at the level of structure and subject matter, due to which Pseudo-Ars amatoria was recognized as the work of the ancient poet, and so endowed with auctoritas, characteristic of school texts. In the third chapter, the author supplements the observations concerning the literary context with an analysis of messages found in Cracow manuscripts. He discusses the contents of the codices and their origin in the context of curriculum reforms related to the growing interest of ars dictaminis, proving the usefulness of the medieval poem in the art of writing. He supports his conclusions with comments regarding other codices. The Boncompagno da Signa’s Rota Veneris treaty (BJ 2458) serves as a starting point for the approximation of the basic themes of ars dictaminis, which are then distinguished as the compositional axis of the central part of the poem. In order to document the didactic potential of Pseudo-Ars amatoria, the author refers to information about the ‘lost witnesses’ of the transmission, Jan of Słupca’s codex described by Aleksander Brückner in Medieval Latin Poetry in Poland and the codex of Stanisław Ciołek’s chancellery, presented by Bolesław Ulanowski in Liber formularum ad ius Polonicum necnon canonicum spectantium in codice Regiomontano asservatarum, as well as unpublished marginal notes from BJ 2115.
In summary, there are two primary teaching objectives resulting from reading the work in the Cracow University milieu, which correspond to Peter Allen’s conclusions regarding the exact meaning of the textbooks of courtly love and the main directions of the reception of Ovid’s teaching poems. Pseudo-Ars amatoria was considered a school text, adequate for transmitting the basics of Latin grammar, similar to its ancient model, and, due to the suitable subject matter and applied rhetorical figures, especially useful in explaining the rules of ars dictaminis.

“Longas carpere perge uias”: The Role of Wandering as Ovid’s remedium amoris in the Compositional Structure of Samuel Twardowski’s Nadobna Pasqualina

In the paper, the author juxtaposes and compares Ovid’s Remedia amoris and Nadobna Pasqualina by Samuel Twardowski in order to show how the genre convention of the Latin love elegy influenced the shaping of the Polish Baroque poem. The plane of comparison is formed by selected compositional and content elements, that is the compositional frame based on the epic convention, together with the definition of poetic aims and assumptions, and the topos of love as a disease, characteristic of the elegiac, along with a healing journey.
So far Twardowski’s work has been described as a “spiritual romance” (romans duchowny), although such classification is unsatisfactory and the notion itself is vague. In more recent studies, therefore, attention is drawn to the need for a broader look at the genre form of Nadobna Pasqualina and allows for the coexistence of elements specific to different literary genres. Starting from this postulate, the author briefly describes the assumptions of genre classification based on genological constructivism and distances himself from the concept of the spiritual romance, emphasizing the epic qualities of Nadobna Pasqualina, also those that bring it closer to the epyllion and highlight the dialogue of various components (part one). Therefore, the epic frame of the work does not exclude the exposure of the elegiac motif of love as a disease and wandering as a cure.
The main part of the argument is divided into five parts (2–7). The second part of the study discusses the epic compositional frame of Twardowski’s work and his self-representation as a narrator of the poem about love struggles that is stylised as a story of war and displays didactic tendencies. The third part is devoted to the compositional frame of Remedia amoris, which places Ovid’s work within the convention of love didacticism. In addition, it revaluates the motifs of war and love presenting them as an illness and emphasizes the need for medicinal products, which are the subject of the elegy. In the fourth part of the study, the author reinterprets Pasqualina’s unfortunate love as a condition requiring treatment. Consequently, the fifth part is devoted to the comparison of how Twardowski and Ovid shaped this topos. Both suggest that one cannot get rid of love. It is only possible to immune oneself to love’s destructive influence by strengthening the forces of reason (firmitas mentis, “the other armed thought” – myśl insza uzbrojona, and the talisman of wisdom). In Ovid’s work, the journey is perceived only as a moving away from the source of love, which makes it possible to gain distance, while in Twardowski’s poem its didactic value and the need for self-improvement are also emphasized. The sixth and seventh parts of the paper concern the compositional role of related topoi of love as a disease and wandering as a cure. For Ovid, they are one of many remedia which he describes in his elegy, consistently striving for poetic fame (part six). Twardowski, in turn, uses them to shape the composition frame and fill it with an allegorical story about the need for self-improvement (part seven).
The conclusions of the analysis are presented in the summary (part eight). In both works, the journey has a therapeutic and didactic character and is connected with love understood as both war and illness. For Ovid, however, it is only a literary topos, while in the case of Pasqualina it enables Twardowski to shape the content and composition of a multidimensional allegorical work. As a typical elegiac motif, it co-shapes and enriches the genre form of Nadobna Pasqualina, which derives from the epic, and should not therefore be limited only to the heretofore accepted category of spiritual romance.

The Lost Castilian Epic

The main aim of the paper is to present the most important Castilian epic poems belonging to the so-called lost epic, i.e. anonymous texts that have not survived to our times, but one can assume with a high degree of probability that they existed, first in oral circulation, and later in prose versions in chronicle and in romancero.
The existence of old Castilian epic is undermined by the individualistic theory of the origin of epic poems authored by the French researcher Joseph Bédier, who believed that there were only poems that have survived in writing, but two other theories undermine these assumptions: the neotraditional theory of the Spanish medievalist Ramón Menéndez Pidal and the eclectic theory proposed by the British hispanist Alan Deyermond. Both agree on the existence of the Castilian epic in oral tradition, with each assuming their different origin and a different number of unpreserved poems. They also agree on the causes of the disappearance of the oldest Castilian epic songs, which, even if written down, could share the fate of thousands of manuscripts destroyed due to wars, fires or normal wear and tear. Only two have survived in original versions: The Poem of the Cid in an incomplete manuscript from the first half of the 14^th century and a hundred verses of the Roncesvalles (Roncevaux) poem in a manuscript also from the beginning of the 14^th century. Two other epic works are known thanks to later adaptations of the texts to the requirements of the erudite epic mester de clerecía (Spanish: craft of the clergy), namely the Poema de Femán González (Poem on Femán González) and Mocedades de Rodrigo (The Youthful Actions of Rodrigo). The former comes from the mid-13^th century, while the latter from the mid-14^th century.
Nevertheless, there is indirect evidence of the existence of old Castilian epic, including the prose versions of epic legends in medieval Latin and Castilian chronicles, as well as the occurrence of typical epic motifs in late medieval and renaissance romances, which are believed to have been created by cutting longer poems into shorter texts. The two 13^th-century Latin chronicles, Chronicon mundi by Lucas de Tuy and De rebus Hispaniae by Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, contain the richest epic material, while among the Castilian chronicles Estoria de España, commonly known under the title Primera Crónica General given by Menéndez Pidal, and Crónica de 1344, stand out in this respect.
The main body of the paper is a discussion of the lost poems based on the Castilian chronicles mentioned above. The list includes only those songs whose existence is recognized by the majority of medievalists, i.e.: Bernardo del Carpio, Mainete, La condesa traidora (Treacherous Countess), Cantar de los siete infantes de Lara (Song of the Seven Lara Princes), Romanz del Infant García (A Romance about Infanta García) andCantar de Sancho II y el cerco de Zamora (Song of Sancho II and the siege of Zamora). For each text, a summary is provided along with the sources in which variants of the poems have survived, sometimes directly indicating the existence of today lost epic songs.

Jan Januszowski’s Letters to Marcin Kromer and Tomasz Płaza on Printing Missale Varmiense (1587) in the Lazarus Printing House

Officina Lazari was one of the most prominent printing houses in the 16th-century Cracow. In 1587, it pressed Missale Varmiense, the only post-Tridentine missal produced in early modern Poland-Lithuania. Missale was commissioned by the bishop of Warmia, Marcin Kromer, who was persuaded to work with the Cracow printer after a recommendation from Tomasz Płaza, his long-time assistant. The history of this publishing venture—a multifaceted, dynamic process, spread over a period of about five years—can be reconstructed thanks to surviving archival documents, inter alia letters that Januszowski-the printer sent to bishop Kromer and his factotum Płaza. Composed respectively in 1585 and 1586, these letters give detailed insight into how the production of Missale Varmiense was planned and organised, constituting the kind of evidence very rare for early printed books produced in Poland-Lithuania. The earlier letter is an official Latin supplication sent by the printer to the prelate. The other letter, addressed to the bishop’s assistant, who was also the manager of the publishing process is practically oriented and personal, written at the time when the work of Januszowski and his sponsors was put to a halt by the Cracow cathedral chapter in the spring of 1586.