Abstract
Translated from Polish by David Frick
From the Editors:
The 2017 Michael Henry Heim Prize in Collegial Translation was awarded to David Frick, University of California, Berkeley, for his “Multiscripturality in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania: New Research Approaches,” a translation of “Wielopiśmienność Wielkiego Księstwa Litewskiego: Nowe perspektywy badawcze” by Jakub Niedźwiedź, Jagiellonian University, Cracow.
The very title of Jakub Niedźwiedź’s article, translated by David Frick as “Multiscripturality in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania: New Research Approaches,” indicates that this is a pioneering work in a field located at the intersection of sociolinguistics, history of literature, and history. The concept of “multiscripturality,” a neologism in English, is a literal translation of the neologism coined by the author in Polish. As Frick remarks in his comments, the translator uses this key term “to bring the reader to the text,” in order to arouse curiosity about the topic. But Frick’s endeavor, which we commend here, is also a painstaking effort to “bring the text to the reader,” that is, to make the subject matter accessible to anyone unfamiliar with the broader historical context and with the styles of expression typical of Polish scholarship and, more generally, of written Polish. This aim could be successfully achieved only by a translator who is not only fluent in both languages but also possesses an intimate familiarity with the nuances of the subject matter and with the expectations of the translated text’s intended audience.
The Michael Henry Heim Prize is awarded by the editors of East European Politics & Societies and Cultures (EEPS), which publishes the winning translations. EEPS is sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).
Wendy Bracewell
Krzysztof Jasiewicz
From the Translator:
The “Key Words” and “Abstract” are the author’s own. I have edited them very lightly.
The author is one of a growing cohort of younger Polish scholars who have become intimately acquainted with current scholarship in Western Europe and, especially, in the Anglo-Saxon world, while remaining as well versed in the impressive scholarship of the East (even if they have different focuses) as is the generation that taught them. It is a combination that few can offer, and it augurs well for the field. He is the product of a long tradition at the Jagiellonian University of the most innovative and solid bodies of work in the philology of Old Polish.
I had a reason for leaving the author’s “Abstract” in large measure his own. At one point, the author uses the phrase “multi-lingualism and multi-alphabeticism.” This, I believe, is his attempt at Anglicizing the first difficulty I encountered as translator; indeed it is the first word of the title: wielopiśmienność. It is, I believe, a neologism. A Google search turns up only a page-full of references to this article. It is not to be found in the large Oxford Polish-English Dictionary, indeed in any dictionary known to me beginning with the early modern period. Yet, I would not be surprised to soon find it in broader usage. The author’s use of two “multi-” English words to convey the very kernel of this important work testifies to problems of translation in an innovative work like this. (In the title to the abstract, he settles on one word: “multi-literacy.”)
The word would be transparent to an educated Pole, and yet still a concept to understand only by reading the article. Wielo- is used in many compound words, and is indeed correctly rendered in English as Multi- (e.g., wielopartyjny, multiparty). The second part is also transparent, but an apparent neologism—piśmienność. The root pis- begins its long career with pisać, “to write,” as in the broadly used piśmiennictwo, “writing, (older) literature.”
Wielopiśmienność, then, has the sense of multi-literacy, but it means more than that. It means the ability to function in a world not only of many languages, but also of many writing systems, including multiple established versions of the same alphabet (Ruthenian skoropis and Chancery Ruthenian, both explained below). Although the author has not yet pushed his research in that direction (as Simon Franklin has done in his masterful Writing, Society, and Culture in Early Rus’, c. 950–1300, Cambridge, 2002), the article clearly portends a move in that direction. That is, of a granular reconstruction of the written environment in which a given society functioned (including graffiti, coins, placards, etc.).
“Multiscripturality,” in my opinion, although a neologism, has the same degree of transparency, while making the reader sit up, take notice, and decide that “all will become clear” only in the course of reading the work in question. (My own work has been heading on a parallel tract, and I had already thought of using the term before I encountered Professor Niedźwiedź’s felicitous Polish version.)
This one translation problem exemplifies in a nutshell the perennial problem all translators have faced, and with which every theoretician of translation has grappled in a great variety of terms and arguments: does the translator want to bring the text to the reader, or the reader to the text? Over history, translations have been produced at both extremes of what should be considered a continuum, from a loose paraphrase that attempts, for instance, to make Goethe speak twenty-first-century American, to the effort to force the reader to come to terms with, say, Rabelais’s neologisms and personal style. Wielopiśmienność, multiscripturality, are good examples of bringing the reader to the text.
I had thought I had become a translator in my spare time only with recent translations of the contemporary Polish fiction-writer, Jerzy Pilch. But then I remembered that I had translated 880 printed pages of the seventeenth-century confessional-polemical works of Orthodox Archbishop Meletij Smotryc’kyj, who later converted to the Uniate Church (d. 1633). Then I noticed how much translation goes into scholarship produced by a non-East-Central European, who tries to speak both to the Anglo-Saxon and the Slavic world. Then I translated the Complete Polish Letters of Fryderyk Chopin.
These are all very different sorts of works, and I have ranged widely across the translator’s spectrum discussed above. Translating a scholarly article demands still other solutions. I am quite in agreement with Michael Heim about the need for scholars to translate the scholarly works of people working more or less in their own field. I’m not sure Michael did much of it himself, focusing as he did in belle-lettres, but I sorely miss, for all sorts of reasons, the opportunity to discuss all this with him.
I found (in spite of my choice for the first title word) that this sort of translating required a lot of bringing the text to the reader. There are many things an educated Pole simply knows, while his/her Anglo-Saxon counterpart may need a little help. Polish scholarly style differs considerably from English, although members of Niedźwiedź’s generation are beginning to emulate the writings of their Western colleagues. Still, long, complicated Polish sentences need to be broken down into the shorter sentences more familiar to English readers. That needs to be bolstered by a consistent use of English punctuation tricks to make longer sentences transparent. Poles, if they use them at all, employ m-dashes in quite different ways; the semicolon is practically unknown to them, and their use of commas causes a lot of head-scratching to an English reader. This all means that I find myself closer on the spectrum to “bringing the text to the reader.” In the case of Pilch, for example, I chose to force the reader to come to terms with the peculiarities of Pilch’s idiosyncratic style.
There is no satisfactory solution to the question of transliteration of names and places in works like these. I have decided to adhere to the author’s usage, not because I (or he) make any claims for the Polishness of this story; quite the opposite.
David Frick
The paper deals with the problem of using different languages of writing in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. Among them there were: Latin, Polish, Ruthenian, Church Slavonic, Lithuanian, German, Yiddish, Hebrew, Arabic and Greek, written in five alphabets: Latin, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic and Greek. The author noticed that this multi-lingualism and multi-alphabeticism was omitted in Polish studies about the history of literature of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. He argues that including these two issues in the studies on the Commonwealth’s history is crucial to better understand the multi-cultural and multi-ethnic character of this country. One of the main questions of the paper is about the relationship between a script and identity. The author notices that a comparative approach can be especially productive in such research. He examines similar borderland processes in use of writing in medieval and early modern England, Sicily, Malta, Cyprus, Venice, Dubrovnik, Moldova and Andalusia. It is illustrated by a few cases of use of the Cyrillic, Latin and Arabic alphabets. The author draws a comparison between the sixteenth-century literary languages of Spanish Moriscos and Lithuanian Tatars. Both these languages were based on the written version of a vernacular language (Romance and Byelorussian) in the Arabic alphabet.
Introduction
Two valuable prints are preserved in two Cracow libraries: in the Jagiellonian and in that of the Bernardines, the one from 1501, the second from 1477. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, both belonged to Humanists: one to Biernat of Lublin, the other to Adam Jakubowicz of Kotra, also known as Adam of Wilno. Both authors were men of the pen, Biernat (ca. 1465–ca. 1529) is known today as the author of the oldest books printed in the Polish language, whereas Adam (d. in 1516 or 1517) lectured on Horace at the Cracow University. Their education and areas of competence allowed them to fulfill the function of secretaries: Biernat for the Palatine of Ruś, Jan Pilecki; Adam for King Aleksander Jagiellończyk. They were both also members of the clergy.
More or less at the same time, each of them placed at the end of their books a few lines of text: Biernat entered his in 1516, 1 Adam between 1508 and 1516. 2 Those notes have one important common trait: both are concise autobiographies, presumably among the oldest that came into being in that part of Europe. What drew my attention was not only the Humanistic need to leave a written trace behind, but also the manner of notation itself. Biernat of Lublin employed the Latin language and Gothic cursive, whereas Adam of Wilno wrote his autobiography in Ruthenian using the skoropis script. 3 Beneath his autobiography, Adam placed in addition a Latin epigram (recorded in Gothic cursive), which he provided with a commentary in the margin in the Ruthenian language: “i sam smolenskyj Władyka togo ne umejet.” 4
Biernat didn’t really have a choice: the written Polish language was only in its beta phase at that time, thus the only means for recording his biography was Latin (the choice of script remains a separate question, since the author of Paradise of the Soul [Raj duszny, a Polish work] knew both Gothic and Humanistic script). Meanwhile Adam of Wilno—who employed equally fluently both scriptural systems, Latin and Ruthenian, and both alphabets—had a choice. The autobiography, the epigram, and the Cyrillic commentary make it perfectly clear that the author was proud of his doubled scriptural competencies, and yet—in spite of being a person who belonged entirely to Latinitas—he recorded his life’s account in Cyrillic, and in the Ruthenian language.
The texts of the Wilno canon Adam Jakubowicz from Kotra focus, as though through a lens, the problem I intend to examine in my article. The question is this: what is the significance for our historical investigations of the fact that the older writers were often multiscriptural? And how are we to investigate this multiscripturality? I intend to divide this question into many other questions that mark new research fields. The problem of multiscripturality seems an essential lacuna in the context of the way the study of the history of literature in the old Commonwealth has been carried out up to now. Polish literary scholars normally couched their studies from the perspective of a concrete language, in other words Polish, sometimes also Latin. And so, Jerzy Ziomek’s Renaissance is a description of the historical-literary process in the old Commonwealth (since Ziomek does not limit himself to the Crown lands of the Kingdom of Poland), based primarily on works recorded in the Polish language. Such a perspective is historically justified and useful for the construction of a Polish national identity. It creates, however, the impression that the literature of the sixteenth-century Commonwealth was Polish, Western, and Roman-Latin in its Catholic or Protestant version.
Meanwhile, looking at how the old authors wrote demands, so to speak, a change in perspective. That question, based on the conjunction HOW, is based on an analysis of source texts, not on prepared editions selected by the editor and printed in a contemporary typeface, in the contemporary editorial layout. Encountering the authentic written form is an important factor that has been passed over in investigations into the old literature as they have hitherto been conducted: that foundational factor is writing. Contrary to appearances, this is no trivial matter, just as—keeping proportions in mind—the constructivism typographical form of the first edition of Julian Przyboś’s Sponad of 1930 (in accepted Polish Z ponad “From Above”) plays no trivial role.
The experience of writing and multiscripturality requires the creation of an alternative narration of the history or histories of literatures. Before this can occur, however, a reconnaissance is required, which entails the experience of the multiscripturality of one of the provinces of the Commonwealth.
Who Knew How to Read and Write? Levels of Literacy
Probably each researcher who deals with the history and culture of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania has encountered these issues. Sources written in Lithuania in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (since these are the two centuries that interest me particularly) were recorded or printed in various written languages. Most frequently we encounter three of them: Latin, Polish, and Ruthenian, recorded in the Latin or the Cyrillic alphabet. It is in these three written languages that texts were compiled in the areas of the judiciary, legislation, theology, belles lettres, historiography, economics, etc.
From the practical point of view, the matter is rather simple. We have two alphabets and three written languages. One needs to complete courses in Latin and Ruthenian palaeography, learn Latin, and finally the two remaining languages. Admittedly, the acquisition of proficiency in these areas requires several years of rather intensive work, but the effort is worth it: thanks to it, 90% of the texts produced in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania open up before the researcher. Our passive literary competencies achieve in this fashion the level of a relatively well educated citizen of that state.
But still, the acquired level of “Lithuanian” scripturality as a result of such studies is not, and will not be, the highest. Were we to compare the literary competencies of such an educated historian or historian of history with the competencies of an average seventeenth-century scribe from the Castle Court in Połock or Nowogródek it would turn out that the first would be unequal or incomplete. Contrary to us, such a scribe would know not only how to read, but also be able quickly to edit and record texts in the Latin, Polish, and Ruthenian languages, further also to go fluidly from skoropis to chancery script and back again, precisely as Adam Jakubowicz of Kotry did.
Marco Mostert, a Dutch medievalist who works on the history of writing, distinguished four chief levels of literacy: illiteracy, half-illiteracy, half-literacy, and literacy. 5 This model illustrates rather well the use of writing in medieval and early modern times (actually, it could be applied to today), and it fits Latin Europe, where two languages of writing and one alphabet dominate. These languages are usually Latin and one vernacular language. In the case, for example, of thirteenth-century England. there were in fact as many as three languages (Latin, French, and English); 6 since, however, all of them used the Latin alphabet, if someone was able to read even one of them, especially Latin, he could manage to decipher a text in the two remaining. From the perspective of regions that are culturally mixed, the model of the four levels of literacy becomes even more complicated.
Contemporary students of the history of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania deal well with reading and writing in Polish; they are able, for example, to write—without major problems—a presentation and later read it without difficulty at a conference. Moreover, by virtue of the research subject, they read well in Ruthenian and Latin. And still, they would have to give up, were they faced with drawing up a list in the Ruthenian language, composing a Latin epigram, or simply to recite both those texts aloud, correctly and fluently. And yet, those competencies belonged to the most fundamental among those that the graduate of a seventeenth-century gymnasium could demonstrate; and thus, he would have been a person recognized in the seventeenth-century as fully literate. That would signify that, in comparison with a writer from Połock, the contemporary researcher is suspended somewhere between full literacy and half-literacy, or even half-illiteracy. Such a consideration of a contemporary researcher about himself as a half-illiterate can cause a certain discomfort, while inclining one, nonetheless, at the same time to pose different questions about literacy and illiteracy than have been raised until now.
These questions concern primarily the citizens of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The most fundamental question that ought be posed is this: what, in the given geographical-historical context did it mean to be a literate man or woman and an illiterate man or woman? If someone could read and write in Latin but did not know Ruthenian, was he illiterate? Rather not, for in the contrary case we would have to consider Biernat of Lublin an illiterate. Nonetheless, this first, fundamental question causes one to pose further ones: Who in Lithuania knew how to read and, possibly, write? What goals were set for literacy? What were the causes in Lithuania of setting a certain person or social group beyond the circle of literate persons? That final question concerns above all the social status of women in Lithuania.
The Investigation of Multiscripturality
Ruthenian, Polish, and Latin were not the only written languages in use in Lithuania in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Some groups inhabiting that state employed Lithuanian, Church Slavonic, German, Hebrew, Yiddish, Arabic, and Greek. And so, when we sum up all those languages and alphabets, it turns out that ten written languages were used in Lithuania, which could be written down in five alphabets, whereby certain written languages had several versions, such as, for example, the Ruthenian language, recorded in the Cyrillic, Latin, and Arabic alphabets.
On the one hand, such a multiplicity of scripts brings forth many complications when we attempt to (re)create a history of reading and writing in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. On the other hand, this multiscripturality makes of Lithuania a fascinating subject for research. The first complication is the fact that there is probably no researcher able to read all those written languages competently, to say nothing of writing in them. It is, however, a near certitude that in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania there was similarly no one who could know all these scriptural systems. One can come to terms with this problem today by working in teams, the members of which possess mutually complementing competencies.
A greater difficulty is the lack of sources, which hinders, or sometimes renders impossible, answers to certain questions. Sometimes that arises from the very nature of the historical sources. For example, we would never discover the level of literacy in the second half of the seventeenth century, even if we had archives preserved in their entirety. That question would remain without an exhaustive answer even in the case of cities like Cracow or London, where they have significantly richer archives. In the case of Lithuania, however, we are faced more often with the situation in which the sources were simply destroyed. Then the possibility of understanding certain phenomena comes to light only after recourse to historical comparisons and undertaking attempts at careful comparison with analogical phenomena in other regions of Europe.
The Grand Duchy of Lithuania was not the only European state in which multiscripturality existed in earlier centuries. It seems that researchers of Lithuanian literacy can acquire great benefits by referring to the examples of medieval Andalusia as well as Norman Sicily and southern Italy, 7 and in early modern times to the multiscriptural situation in Spain, 8 Cyprus, Crete, and Malta, in the Republic of Venice and the Republic of Dubrovnik, and, among the closer territories, in Moldavia and in the Ruthenian territories of the Polish Crown. The capital of Cyprus, Famagusta, can serve as an example, where in the second half of the fifteenth century four written languages were in use: Greek, Arabic, Frankish, and Italian, written in three alphabets. 9 We encounter a similar multiscripturality a few decades later in Wilno, with the stipulation that the combination of languages was different.
As we see, there were rather many such multiscriptural territories in Europe, primarily in its border regions. We encounter multiscripturalism also outside of Europe and in times going far beyond the parameters of this paper. Still, even an initial reconnaissance allows us to assert that the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, in spite of many similarities with other regions, belongs to the more complicated examples of the use of writing, and is, most likely, in this regard, unprecedented. A detailed term for this Lithuanian specificity requires, however, deeper comparative studies.
Propositions for Comparative Studies
Already at this stage of research it is possible to single out many similarities and differences between Lithuania and other multiscriptural states and pose the first hypotheses and questions.
Michael T. Clanchy, the author of one of the most important medieval studies of the last half century, a book entitled From Memory to Written Record, devoted to the use of writing in England in the years 1066–1307, noticed that “the mother tongue of ordinary discourse was normally entirely distinct from the language of the script.” 10 Clanchy’s observations concerning Latin, Anglo-Saxon, and French, also suit the realia of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and presumably several other places in Europe. The official written languages in Lithuania were Latin and Ruthenian. Only the second could be understandable to a greater number of the inhabitants of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, since it derived from the Old Belarusan language. Linguists emphasize, however, that one cannot speak of it as a direct representation of the spoken language. 11 With time, the Polish language began to enjoy ever greater popularity, which, in its written form, was likewise, however, not a reflection of the language of the inhabitants of Lithuania. 12 In the XVI and XVII centuries, it fulfilled the function of a second language of Latinitas, and thus was a sort of koiné. It suffices to recall that the Orthodox-Uniate polemics conducted over the Union of Brest were printed in the Polish language, although the authors of those works, such as, for example, Meletij Smotryc’kyj, Hiob Borec’kyj, Jozafat Kuncewicz, and Hipacy Pociej, on a daily basis conversed in their mother tongue—Old Belarusan/Old Ukrainian. 13 And thus the question can be posed: how did Lithuanian authors of those times perceive various versions of the written language, different to various degrees from their own spoken language?
The question of the closer or further relationship to a given writing system to a large extent concerns the politically privileged class, in other words, the szlachta. A lot here had to do with which place of residence, confession, and period we take into consideration. However, a member of the szlachta who lived in the middle of the seventeenth century in the vicinity of Orsza, in other words on the territories of contemporary eastern Belarus, most probably handled Ruthenian skoropis as well as chancery Latin without too much trouble. The question that I would like pose, would be this: did this person feel any sort of connection with a certain writing system or a concrete culture, when he signed his name in the Cyrillic or Latin alphabet. A similar question was posed in the case of the signature of Riccardo di Lucerna, also called Riccardo Saraceno, who died in 1289. He was a knight of King of Sicily, Charles I Anjou, and a man who belonged to two cultures, Latin and Arabic. 14 A document has survived in the colophon of which he signed his name twice: in Latin as Riccardo di Lucerna and in Arabic as Abū ‘Abdullah son of ‘Abdallah tribū from Quaryš.
In research on the writing systems of Lithuania, raising the question of the Ruthenian writing system (also called simple speech or chancery language) seems especially essential. It seems that its function in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was somewhat similar to the Anglo-Saxon language in England in the thirteenth century. No one spoke it, but it remained the language of law and literature. With time, both languages, Anglo-Saxon and Ruthenian, became so distant from the needs of their users that they completely went out of usage, replaced by French, and later written Middle English in England, 15 as well as Polish and Belarusan in Lithuania. One ought pose the question in this manner: how did the process of the dying out of the Ruthenian language run its course, especially in the context of the growing universal usage of Polish? And can one perceive some sort of deeper analogies between the supplanting of the Anglo-Saxon language by French and Ruthenian by Polish?
A further important issue is the use of various systems of writing in the same text. In Lithuania, it was very often the case that the initial and the concluding formulaic language was recorded in one language and alphabet, whereas the content was in a different one. Most often we are met with Ruthenian-Polish documents, Latin-Ruthenian, or Latin-Polish. We encounter analogous cases in Norman Sicily in the seventeenth century. In a privilege promulgated by Admiral George of Antioch, the beginning is in Arabic (it contains an expression of praise to Allah), the main part of the document is in Greek with a register of peasants, supplied with an interlineal Arabic transformation, whereas the final formulae, among others the attested signatures, are again in Arabic. Finally, we find an invocation to Allah. 16
Such documents could only be produced by skilled, multilingual chanceries. The Norman chancery in Sicily was composed of three sections—Latin, Greek, and Arabic—in similar fashion to the chancery of Grand Duke Witold in the XV century (Ruthenian-Latin-Arabic) and, to a certain extent, similar to the later, sixteenth-century chanceries of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, in which secretaries and scribes were employed who were fluent in the Latin, Ruthenian, and Polish writing systems. Certain Lithuanian officials, such as, for example, Adam of Wilno, or the Wilno Land Scribe deserve the description of homines bi- or trilingui, exactly as, a few centuries earlier, George of Antioch was called. So how—this is my subsequent question—from our current perspective are we to define the identity of those multiscriptural writers who with such ease crossed the boundaries of cultures?
The question of Tatar texts from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania is connected with this problem. In the second half of the sixteenth century, the Lithuanian Tatars lost their language, adopting at first Belarusan, and later Polish. 17 They did not, however, give up the Arabic alphabet. In this manner, from the end of the sixteenth century a new literary language came into being in Lithuania, employed primarily in kitaby and chamaily. 18 That was not, however, a language that was identical with the written language used by the members of the Orthodox Church, and not only with regard to the alphabet at that. Borrowings from Arabic and Tatar, likewise the means of the introduction of arguments in the text, permit us to define it as an Islamo-Ruthenian written language (in a later period also Islamo-Polish). A similar phenomenon came into being in the Spain of the time, which in the sixteenth century, the Moriscos, in other words, Spanish Muslims, developed their literature in a Romance language. 19 The question then arises: Can we inscribe the literature of Lithuanian Muslims in the broader current of the creation at that time of European national literatures?
Writing and Identity
A student of the literature of the Moriscos, Leonard Patrick Harvey, places special emphasis on the fact that their stubborn adherence to their own alphabet and their own version of the Romance language was caused by the fact that the Spanish “Muslims made every effort to be different.” 20
At this point, we can pose the question whether the attachment of Lithuanian Muslims to the Arabic system of writing is an expression of a similar aspiration toward marking out their separateness. The question remains open, but one can similarly transfer it to other ethno-national groups, as well as other alphabets and written languages. I would therefore like to ask whether it would be possible to ascertain whether some concrete writing system was an indicator of the identities of the peoples inhabiting the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
I began by citing two autobiographies written by Biernat of Lublin and Adam Jakubowicz of Kotra. Contrary to Biernat, Adam had a choice of two writing systems. Presumably the mother tongue of the Humanist originating from around Grodno was Belarusan or Lithuanian, rather not Polish, but certainly not Latin. The choice of Cyrillic and the Ruthenian language was therefore most likely the choice of the manner of recording that was closer to him. In this case, we can treat Cyrillic as a means of articulating one’s cultural affiliation—and, to generalize—one’s identity. This intuition can be authenticated by one further example, almost from the same period. A few years after Adam of Wilno, another Belarusan Humanist, Doctor Franciszek Skaryna from Połock (printer of the earliest large portions of Holy Scripture in Cyrillic), made a similar choice.
Footnotes
1.
Biernat’s autobiography is to be found on the title page of an old printed book: A. Borromeo, Opusculum lepidissimum ac pene diuinum domini Antonii Bonromie comitis, et equitis artiumque doctoris eximii, De Christiana religione contra Hebraeos, [Venetiae, Gregorius de Gregoriis, de Forlivio, 1501], the Library of the Province of the Bernardine Fathers in Cracow, shelf mark XV 626 adl. See S. Grzeszczuk, “O notatkach autobiograficznych, lekturach i bibliotece Biernata z Lublina,” Biuletyn of the Jagiellonian Library 48 (
): 32–61.
2.
Adam Jakubowicz’s note is to be found on the endpaper of the rear binding of the cover of an incunabulum of the Jagiellonian Library: Giuniano Maggio (Iunianus Maius), De priscorum verborum proprietate, Trier, printing house of Bernardus de Colonia, 1477, BJ [=Jagiellonian Library], shelf mark Incunabula 1824. It was discovered by W. Wisłocki, Incunabula typographica Bibliothecae Universitatis Jagellonicae Cracoviensis inde ab inventa arte imprimendi usque ad A. 1500 (Cracow, 1900), 308. Transcription and translation of the text: J. Niedźwiedź, Kultura literacka Wilna (1323–1655), Retoryczna organizacja miasta (Cracow: Wydawnictwo Universitas, ), 152–53. Adam Jakubowicz’s epigram has not been published until now.
3.
Skoropis was one of three types of Cyrillic writing used in the old Commonwealth. It was employed in chanceries and in texts of daily use. It was texts in the Ruthenian language that were recorded in it.
4.
“Not even the Bishop of Smoleńsk himself can read this.” The Orthodox Bishop of Smoleńsk was, at that time, the very well educated Józef Sołtan [Josyf Soltan] (ca. 1450–1521). Adam Jakubowicz of Kotra most certainly had occasion to meet him during the time of his work in the Grand Duke’s chancery.
5.
6.
7.
9.
10.
Clanchy, From Memory to Written Records, 223.
11.
See Б.А. Успенский, История русского литературного языка (ХI–XVII вв.) (Budapest, 1988), 306–7; A. Naumow, Domus divisa. Studia nad literaturą ruską w I. Rzeczypospolitej (Moscow: Aspent Press, ), 388–9; (Cracow: Colloquium Columbinum, 2002), 38.
12.
We are faced with an analogous situation today. Anyone who, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, had the occasion to converse with the Poles of Vilnius most certainly noticed that their spoken language differs significantly from the language of the Polish books and periodicals published in Lithuania. The Polish of those publications, to a greater or lesser extent, reminds one of the literary language used in Poland.
13.
14.
15.
See Clanchy, From Memory to Written Records, 216–23.
16.
See E. Calandra, “Arabi, Greci, Latini di Sicilia. Fonti documentarie di età normanna e svevo,” in L’arte siculo-normanna. La cultura islamica nella Sicilia medievale (Palremo, 2007), 134.
17.
18.
Kitabs were books containing, among other things, histories of the prophets, the life of Muhammed, translations of prayers, as well as Near Eastern legends and explanations of religious rites. Chamails, in turn, were collections of Arabic prayers provided with interlineal translations in Belarusan or Polish. See S. Krzyczyński, Tatarzy litewscy. Próba monografii historyczno-etnograficznej (Warsaw, 1938): 218; Cz. Łapicz, “Zawartość treściowa kitabu Tatarów litewsko-polskich,” Acta Baltico-Slavica 20 (1991): 169–91; G. Miškinienė, Seniausi lietuvos totorių rankraščiai. Grafika, transliteracija, vertimas, tekstų struktūra ir turinys (Vilnius, 2001), 16; A. Konopacki, Życie religijne Tatarów na ziemiach Wielkiego Księstwa Litewskiego w XVI–XIX wieku (Warsaw, ), 137–41.
19.
See L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 123–41.
20.
Ibid., p. 141.