At the Crossroad of Confessions

The focus of my study is a mid-seventeenth-century Latin manuscript prayer book. Its most basic characteristics should attract the attention of scholars of the period since it was compiled by a Lutheran married couple from Prešov for their individual religious practice. In examining the prayer book, I was able to identify the basic source of the manuscript, which was previously unknown to researchers: the compendium of the German Lutheran author Philipp Kegel. The manuscript follows the structure of Kegel’s volume and also extracts a number of texts from the German author’s work, which mainly collects the writings of medieval church fathers. In addition to Kegel, I have also been able to identify a few other sources; mainly the writings of Lutheran authors from Germany (Johann Arndt, Johann Gerhardt, Johann Rist, and Johann Michael Dilherr). I give a description of the physical characteristics of the manuscript, its illustrations, the hymns that accompany the prayers, and the copying hands. I will also attempt to identify the latter more precisely. The first compilers of the manuscript were Andreas Glosius and his wife Catharina Musoniana from Prešov. I also organize the biographical data we have about their life and will correct the certainly erroneous provenance of Andreas Glosius, whose name appears in the context of several important contemporary manuscripts, including the gradual of Prešov. In the last part of my paper, I will also show how well known and popular Philipp Kegel’s work was in the early modern Kingdom of Hungary. This is necessary because, although the data show that there was a very lively reception of Philipp Kegel’s work in Hungary, previous scholars have only tangentially dealt with the Hungarian presence of his work.

The “Spiritual Hammer” (1656) as an Emblematic translation of “Imitatio Christi” by Thomas à Kempis

The subject of this article is a Polish-language collection of emblems by Paweł Mirowski, the Spiritual Hammer, 1656. The work is in fact a paraphrase of Thomas à Kempis’s Imitatio Christi, which the author admits neither on the title page nor in the preface. In addition, the translation is supplemented with five to seven engravings (depending on the surviving copies) of an emblematic kind. The purpose of this article is twofold. Firstly, to juxtapose Mirowski’s translation with Kempis’s work in order to reveal his translation techniques and discuss the advisability of their use. Secondly, to analyse the purpose of using emblematics in the Imitatio Christi and to point to two hitherto unknown copper engravings preserved in a unique copy of the Seminary Library in Warsaw.

The Novelty of Bohuslav Balbín’s Biographies about Saint John of Nepomuk and their Role in Proving His Veneration

I am focusing on the attributes of three biographies written about Saint John of Nepomuk by Bohuslav Balbín (1621–1688) Czech Jesuit monk and historian. I am searching for the answer for the question that how can the features of ecclesiastic discipline of cult of saints after the council of Trient and the question of public respect before the canonization be caught out in these texts.This biographies of Saint John of Nepomuk has been written to be more than simple hagiographies. Due to their complexity and structural features they have become suitable to enter into a contoversy with Pope Urban VIII’s Coelestis Hierusalem decree, in which he firmly forbid the veneration of individuals not approved by the Holy See. Balbín wanted to prove it that the veneration to Saint John of Nepomuk has been existing continuously since his death, and its manifestations characterize the contemporary communities as well, finally, this devotion becomes ever more intensive therefore it is not inconsistent with the Pope Urban VIII’s restrictionary arrangements.

Exhaustion and Recycling

This paper examines the works of representative modernist authors who have rewritten the myth of the Danaids in a self-reflective way. They reuse certain elements of the myth in order to address some of the crucial issues of cultural transmission: interpretation, poetic tradition and communication. The argument focuses on the recycling of the myth of the Danaids as a symbol of endless historical-philological (Nietzsche) and psychological (Freud) interpretations, the exhaustion and the reinvention of the classical literary tradition (Babits), and the impossible possibility of mediating the living voice through telephonic communication (Proust).