Dariusz Chemperek

The anonymous poem Proteus was published in 1564 as the first literary response to Jan Kochanowski’s Satyr albo Dziki mąż (Satyr, or the Wild Man). In this article, authorship of Proteus is attributed on the basis of literary network analysis, the confessional sympathies that are present in the text (the influences of anti-trinitarianism), and the connections to the court of Mikołaj Radziwiłł the Black. The author of Proteus is Cyprian Bazylik, a poet, musician, printer, and translator who in the 1560s was associated with Radziwiłł’s court and was a follower of anti-trinitarianism.

The aim of this paper is to examine the impact of the Brest Bible (its lexis and phraseology) on the religious poetry of the followers of the Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confession in Poland and the Polish Reformed Church in the 16th and 17th centuries. The article is a preliminary study of the subject.
The author analysed thematically consistent poems on death and divided them into three types: occasional poetry, represented by Cyprian Bazylik’s Short description of an affair at the death and funeral of the Enlightened Duchess Elżbieta of Szydłowiec Radziwiłłowa (Krótkie wypisanie sprawy przy śmierci i pogrzebie Oświeconej Księżny Paniej Halżbiety z Szydłowca Radziwiłowej, 1562); functional literature, illustrated with four songs from a Protestant hymnary by Krzysztof Kraiński (1609) and Andrzej Hünefeld (1646); and fine poetry, for which the author chose the The Quartan Fever Penance (Pokuta w kwartanie, written in 1652).
For the Old-Polish Protestant authors of religious poetry, the Calvinist Bible is a constant reference point. It determines but by no means limits the horizons of imagination. Writing about deathly issues, the authors of occasional, high-art poetry or hymnary songs rarely borrow from the lexis of the Brest Bible and freely realize their artistic concepts. In their works there are only a few most expressive phrases and lexemes from the first Polish Protestant Bible. In the analyzed poems, Biblical phrases usually appear in the form of paraphrases, well-thought-out verses or Biblical scenes. The poets borrow words or Biblical phrases only when the described plot is scarcely known, usually drawn from a rarely referred to Old-Testament book. This gesture can be interpreted as a token of the poet’s circumspection.
 

This paper has two objectives: to characterize Lutheran communities in Vilnius depicted in counter-Reformation satires written and published by Jesuits and to provide detailed information concerning individual Lutheran priests and members of the community of Augsburg Evangelicals.

Six satires analysed here form an interesting source material because they reflect – in an obviously exaggerated and hyperbolized manner – facts and situations, most of which were not recorded in Lutheran sources. In addition to commonly known individuals, such as the royal physician and diarist Maciej Vorbek-Lettow, or the author of the most famous Polish postil Samuel Dambrowski, the texts also feature less known persons, such as a senator’s wife, Zuzanna de domo Nonhart Chreptowiczowa, pastors Mikołaj Burchardy, Adam Reks and Dawid Krusius. Thanks to diverse techniques and genres (news, elements of heroicomicum, parodies of gratulatio, a letter, visio, songs) the image of the Lutheran ministers from Vilnius is colourful and generally non-stereotypical. Beside schematically sketched characters (deceivers, misers, philanderers, drunkards, sybarites), the satires also present educated pastors, such as Samuel Dambrowski, Joachim Goebel, or priests endowed with the temperament of warriors. In none of them is the knowledge of Lutheran priests questioned.

Attributional research revealed that the satire Witanie na pierwszy wyjazd z Królewca do kadłubka saskiego wileńskiego iksa Hern Kutermachra (Vilnius, 1642) is about the priest Joachim Goebel, later a secretary in Colloqium Charitativum on the Lutheran side (Toruń, 1645), while the poem was most probably written by a Jesuit, Jan Chądzyński, a lecturer at the Vilnius University.