Poezja średniowieczna i nowołacińska w Polsce jako wyraz kultury chrześcijańskiej

Abstrakt

Baptism of the ruler of Poland automaticly included our country into the range of the Latin culture with Latin as its universal language. This unifying character of the Latin culture has an influence on the Christian system of education. In Poland Latin will remain the language of literature till the 18th century. The early Latin poetry in Poland was closely connected with the necessity of having a cult. Parallelly, some Polish literary works appeared (the beginning of the 14th c.) with the Virgin Mary themes as dominant. In the 16th c. despite the poetics of Renaissance the religious, Latin poetry was still developing in Poland though vernacular works (of Kochanowski, Sęp-Szarzyński and others) got enriched by strong biblical inspiration. It was in the 16th century that a lot of religious songs came to existence some of which have been used till contemporary times. Religious themes were characteristic of the poetry of the 17th century. The development of the Polish poetry was particularly connected with the cult of the Virgin Mary. The Latin poetry, more freely using the biblical tradition breaks with writing strictly according to the ancient pattern. There are interesting examples of joining the biblical stilization with the Horatian one (Sarbiewski) and thus going back to the output of the ancient classics. Christianity has come to our country in the form of the Latin culture; it was closely connected with the religious life and literature (both medieval Latin and new Latin); it inspired a number of Polish literary works. The cult of the Virgin Mary and respect for the tradition of fathers (e.g. religious songs) have appeared in our literature as early as that.