Widzenie Polikarpa. Średniowieczne rozmowy człowieka ze śmiercią

Autoriai turinyje : Marija-Ana Dürrigl, Miroslaw Lenart, Tomasz Wojczak, Jacek Kowzan, Witold Wojtowicz, Andrzej Dąbrówka, Viviana Nosilia, Anna Gostomska, Dominika Gruntkowska, Anna Marciniak-Sikora, Bogdan Rok

In the relatively small corpus of preserved medieval poetry in Polish a special place belongs to a dramatized dialogue between a teacher and personified Death. It stands out by its size (almost 500 lines) and artistic elaboration (fluent rhymed distichs and rich style). Its only known copy, now lost, was called De morte, and in critical editions and scholarly usage it goes under the title Conversation of master Polycarp with Death (Rozmowa mistrza Polikarpa ze mierci¹). The Polish dialogue belongs to a rich Central European tradition of prose treatises, narrative poems, dramatic dialogues in different vernacular languages, mostly Slavic (Czech, Polish, Croatian, Russian, Ukrainian). Our book is the first monograph since the dissertation of Czeslawa Pirożyñska (1966), whose study accompanied a critical edition of the Latin source of the Polycarp tradition. Even older is the state of knowledge in the most extensive studies about he Polish and Chech Polycarp delivered by Vrtel-Wierczyñski. As groundbreaking as both studies were, they became inevitably outdated, and with our monograph we want to give impulse for new research, by offering a review of our knowledge and unknowing about the work and its multifarious tradition and contexts. It could be a starting point for an international comparative research project that should result in a common critical edition of all language realizations. Only then a necessary fundament would be given for any responsible investigations. [...]