This is a Polish translation of an article by David Frick entitled: “Słowa uszczypliwe, słowa nieuczciwe: Th e Language of Litigation and the Ruthenian Polemic” published in: ΧΡΥΣΑΙ ΠΥΛΑΙ — ЗЛАТАЯ ВРАТА. Essays presented to Ihor Ševčenko on his eightieth birthday by his colleagues and students [P. Schreiner, O. Strakhov (ed.), Cambridge, Mass. 2002, „Palaeoslavica” vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 122–138]. The author – an eminent expert in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth culture and literature – analyses the protestations of the citizens of seventeenth-century Vilnius and explores thoroughly the language of litigation of the time. Frick focuses also on the writings of Meletij Smotryc’kyj – the most outstanding seventeenth-century Orthodox  polemicist. The autor’s analyses lead to the conclusion that special formulas and rhetorical strategies typical of the language of litigation were familiar to the Orthodox polemicist (after the Union of Brest of 1596) as well as widely used in their writings.

The conceit based on a metaphor presented in the title, played also an important role as an element influencing the shape of extensive passages of the sermon. The analysis of the work confirms the thesis concerning the dependence between the sermon-conceit and the emblematic form. The audience is influenced both by the conceit and the emblem, which is based on the same mechanism – in the course of the disquisition, the presence of the connection between initially contradictory elements is shown.

This article treats about apostrophes in Rozmyslanie przemyskie. In the past few years in mediaeval studies began to appear the questions about what in this biggest old Polish Apocrypha is original, written by it’s author, and what is taken from the Latin sources. Also began to appear the questions about the role of this text (treaty, story, mediatation) and who was it’s author. It was pointed out, inter alia, that some parts of the text is fi nished part of the sermon. The author took a different, than previously indicated, area of the text. She selected for analyses the apostrophes. She analyzed only those apostrophes, which are addressed directly to the characters by the narrator – the independent ones, and not those, which are inserted into the mouth of the other performing character. Due to lack of Latin sources, we can assume that they were written by the Polish author.
Out of the characters, to which the narrator speaks in these complex apostrophes, Judas is distinguished by the number of apostrophes and their content. Invocations to the traitor add not much to the plot, the reader of the apocrypha can learn few about the Judas from them. They rather build the reader’s attitude to this villain, cause they are very emotional. In addition, they refer to these defects of Judas, which can also concerne people of all ages – especially avarice and greed. Their language and content suggest that are the next – next to two sermons – ready, prepared rhetorically, passages of the text that can serve the work of preaching

The paper is the presentation (as the transcription and translation of the text) of the letter written by the humanist and classical scholar, Iustus Lipsius (1547–1606), and entitled by its editor in Cracow Epistola erudita (1602). The rhetorical analyses of this text is based on the Lipsius’s treatise Epistolica institutio (The Principles of Letter-Writing). The main problem concerns the role of traditional rhetoric in the letter writing, especially if the letter is not reduced to a formal document, prepared using repeatable formulas. Early modern epistolography (Petrarca, Erasmus, Lipsius, Vives) recovers the ancient tradition of letter writing, according to which the letter is a kind of written conversation. It gives unique opportunity to meet each other in the symbolic universe of the text.

This essay investigates the correlation between ethical concepts and linguistic theories as represented by mainly Polish scholastics and humanists during the Early Modern Age. The point of departure is criticism of the secondary literature and discussion of typical problems faced by researchers of this period, e.g. a lack of modern editions and the influential biased approach of previous studies of a Kantian bent. It has been argued that linguistic surface structures (in particular diff erences between a rigid scholastic style and an elegant humanist one) are not a reliable criterion to ascertain the correlation in question. Therefore some texts have been analysed in terms of semantic deep structures as reconstructed by L.M. de Rijk and J. Magee. By way of a conclusion, epistemological implications of radical bilingualism being a model example of humanist dynamic semantic structures are compared to a theory of pluralism developed by M. Lynch.

Review

Józef Marecki, Lucyna Rotter, „Jak czytać wizerunki świętych. Leksykon atrybutów i symboli hagiograficznych”

TAiWPN UNIVERSITAS, Kraków 2009