Epistolografia w dawnej Rzeczypospolitej. Tom VII. Literatura, historia, język. Red. Piotr Borek, Marceli Olma. Collegium Columbinum. Kraków 2017.

Epistolografia w dawnej Rzeczypospolitej volume VII. Literatura, historia, język. Ed. Piotr Borek, Marceli Olma. Collegium Columbinum. Cracow 2017

Abstract

The research on the epistolary art in the First Polish Republic is certainly one of the more difficult challenges. Such research requires extraordinary skills, sometimes the manuscripts are barely legible, while the relations between the writer and the reader were often complicated (clientism was not, after all, a one directional phenomenon) and the aggrandizment of a given letter’s addressee was often proportional to the sender’s apparent self-humiliation, thus the social conventions were interwoven with individual preferences. The recently published volume of Epistolografia should be seen within its context, that is, the earlier two volumes of the “Biblioteka Tradycji” (“Library of Tradition”) series. In this series, we find studies and analyses belonging to history, cultural history, and history of literature. The first series contained a number of academic luxury editions of early Polish literature. Indeed, those early letters remain an inexhaustible source of knowledge on the culture of those times.