Between the councils of Constance (1414–1418) and Basel (1431–1445), masters of the University of Cracow wrote numerous tracts and sermons condemning Jan Hus (d. 1415) and his followers, the Hussites. In particular, they condemned the practice of utraquism (that is, taking communion in both bread and wine), which they saw as an act of disobedience against the Church. There was nothing unexpected in this condemnation, which was typical of reactions across much of Europe. But this article argues that Polish scholars such as Stanisław of Skarbimierz (d. 1431) and his student Mikołaj of Błonie (d. c. 1448) challenged Hussite utraquism by endorsing another contentious practice, namely, frequent communion of the eucharistic wafer alone. Stanisław and Mikołaj were influenced by the likes of Mateusz of Cracow, as­serting that frequent communion was a salubrious medicine for the soul when taken sacramentally (by physically consuming the host) or spiritually (through meditation and upholding an attitude of penitence). As this article reveals, Mikołaj later reversed his position on the matter and criticised frequent communion, yet his Tractatus sacerdotalis de sacramentis of 1430, which heavily relied on Stanisław of Skarbimierz, explicitly presented frequent communion as a tool for combatting the Hussites and restoring unity to the Church. What made this so remarkable was that the masters of Cracow endorsed such a contentious practice at a time in which Polish authorities tried to clamp down on any forms of devotional practice that might have had links, no matter how tenuous, to dissidence and the Hussites.

The Venetian historian Giovanni Michele Bruto (1517–1592) arrived in Transylvania in January 1574 to begin to work on his monumental Rerum Ungaricarum libri commisioned by Stephen Báthory. The project’s original initiator was the Transylvanian chancellor Ferenc Forgách (1535–1577), who in 1572 sent a message to Bruto through his client Farkas Kovacsóczy (1540–1594), asking him to undertake the same task offered already eight years before: the writing of a major historical work on 16th century Hungarian history. Brutus accepted Kovacsóczy’s offer enthusiastically at first, but following the Saint Bartholomew’s massacre instead of Alba Iulia he went to Vienna, where he also made some arrangements with Emperor Maximilian’s court physician, Johannes Crato von Krafftheim (1519–1585), to write a history on the reign of Ferdinand I.

In 1583 Bruto was working already in Cracow as the court historian of Báthory, King of Poland since 1576. In his book of letters printed that year, the historian attempted to cover up his seemingly unethical behavior ten years prior by publishing his letters to Crato, Kovacsóczy, Forgách, and Báthory from the two years in question either without dates or with modified dates. This caused some confusion in the literature up to this day.

Through a close reading of the letters and by bringing in new sources, this study reveals Bruto’s peculiar self‑fashioning technique and restores the chronology of the historian’s two journeys to Hungary and Transylvania between 1572 and 1574.

The article discusses the Enchiridion by Erasmus, its past and present audiences, and the symbolic universe through which it has been interpreted. Among its readers, Juliusz Domański and Raymond Marcel are given prominence. Both exemplify a generation that pioneered contemporary Erasmus studies during the 1960s and 1970s, characterised by scientific rigour and distinctive features. Their latest Polish edition of the Handbook (2025) opens a new chapter in the history of Enchiridion’s interpretation. Rather than simply providing Erasmus’s text with routine annotations, Domański and Marcel offer a specific and rather one‑sided interpretative framework. Thus, it requires substantial additions. The article returns then to old but never settled questions about Erasmus’ intellectual and religious identity, and the significance of the Enchiridion within his body of work and the history of Western Christianity. In both cases, the fixed categories of the Renaissance and the Reformation fail to provide adequate answers. The Enchiridion’s relationship with Mediterranean culture runs deeper than the humanist movement and Neoplatonism; its metaphilosophical paths intersect with medieval scholasticism in surprising places, while its involvement in the crisis of Western Christianity reveals a multi‑sensory dimension of early‑modern culture that has been somewhat neglected until now.

This article aims to present to Polish readers the first critical and annotated translation of one of the most famous songs from the corpus of the Occitan troubadours, Kalenda maia [392,9] by Raimbaut de Vaqueiras. Included in the Niezbędnik trubadura anthology, Jacek Kowalski’s earlier, melic translation has important poetic merits and a rather practical function. The philological translation presented in this publication belongs to academic discourse and aims to present a model for translating troubadour poetry into Polish. It is also accompanied by historical, metrical and philological commentary.

The introduction discusses the most important assumptions adopted in the transla­tion and provides a brief rationale behind retranslating Kalenda maia into Polish. The following section also presents translations of two paratexts accompanying the song in the manuscripts: the troubadour’s biography (known as vida) and a fictionalised anecdote introducing the circumstances of the text’s creation (razó). For both texts, their locations in songbooks and critical editions are given. The content of each of the paratexts has been supplemented with footnotes, which explain both linguistic and, above all, historical aspects with reference to studies and sources from the medieval period.

The main part of the article consists of a translation of the song itself, preceded by a detailed (albeit schematic) formal description and an introductory commentary explaining the term ‘estampida’, as the troubadour himself identifies the song as belonging to this genre. The translation is entirely philological and, like the paratexts, has been annotated to provide the necessary context (historical, linguistic, cultural) for readers unfamiliar with Occitan poetry. All comments are based not only on critical editions of the song itself and studies directly related to it, but also on strictly historical comments and those concerning troubadour poetry in the broad sense.

This article identifies and edits Drama tragicum de Maria Augusta Othonis III Imperatoris conjuge, an anonymous Neo-Latin tragedy preserved in Paris BnF lat. 8437. The drama, offering a mediaeval reworking of the Phaedra motif of illicit desire and false accusations of rape, is here attributed to Nicolaus Vernulaeus (1583–1649), the most prolific and successful playwright-professor of the early modern University of Leuven. Drawing on manuscript evidence and Vernulaeus’s own dramatic practice, the article reconstructs the play’s original context and argues for its place within his political and moral didactic theatre. By correcting a long-standing misidentification of the manuscript, this study not only expands Vernulaeus’s oeuvre—long known exclusively through his printed historical tragedies—but also contributes to a fuller understanding of Leuven academic drama and the institutional culture in which Vernulaeus operated.