Magdalena Charzyńska-Wójcik

The objective of this paper is to bring to light an important early 16th-century Polish rendition of the Psalter, Żołtarz Dawidów, translated by Walenty Wróbel and prepared for print by Andrzej Glaber. We argue that in spite of its unique position in the line of Psalter translations into Polish, the Żołtarz has not received a comprehensive and exhaustive treatment. While some detailed issues have been diligently addressed by individual scholars, research on the Żołtarz has generally been overshadowed by Brückner’s (1902) pioneering study, to the extent that one of its two surviving manuscript copies has not received official recognition in the scholarly literature. In particular, alongside the Kórnik manuscript (from 1528) described by Brückner, there exists another 16th-century exemplar (1536), which has been in the possession of the Jagiellonian Library since 1928. Its rediscovery by the authors of the present paper has two important consequences. First of all, the Jagiellonian Żołtarz should become an object of study in its own right. Secondly, its existence requires a re-assessment of the current state of knowledge on the Żołtarz in the light of the data it contains.

The objective of the paper is to argue against a common denotation for Walenty Wróbel's sixteenth-century translation of the Psalter into Polish and its printed version prepared by Andrzej Glaber. It is customary to treat Glaber's interventions into Wróbel's rendition as purely editorial and, in effect, consider the printed version of the Żołtarz to be the work of Wróbel. On the basis of Glaber's treatment of one syntactic phenomenon (the placement of the possessive pronoun in an NP), the paper shows that Glaber's involvement into Wróbel's text far exceeds what Glaber is usually credited with. Therefore, the paper claims that the two works –the manuscript and its printed edition –should be classified and discussed as distinct productions.