Politicus vates – kreacja podmiotu wieszczącego w wybranych staropolskich przepowiedniach elekcyjnych
Politicus Vates: The Creation of a Prophetic Subject in Selected Old-Polish Election Prophecies

Summary/Abstract: This article discusses categories of the genus propeticus in selected election prophecies. It also introduces the term politicus vates (political seer) into the depiction of occasional poetry in Poland. Prophetic stylisation was widely chosen due to large popularity of prophetic conventions, and within these conventions, there developed various communication schemes, a rhetorical style – the genus propheticum – used in ecclesial preaching, and the authority of the books of the Bible, of visionary Christian texts and of their antique predecessors (Apollonian, Sibylline and Cassandran). In this article, the texts of election prophecies created during interregnum after the death of Jan III Sobieski are discussed. One such large group of texts is the later reception of the prophecy by Jerzy Joachim Retyk, based on the prophecy of the diversity of the future monarch. The name of the politicus vates is reserved both for the author of the prophecy and the genus propheticum who was created by him. This term is also used to describe the interpreters and their interpretations of the prophecy which were used to depict the political situation in question. In this study, texts stylised as prophecies are interpreted. Moreover, the prophetic models and their persuasive function are also discussed. The communicative aspects of the interaction with the receiver of the texts (in which the elevated style of the prophecies was used for the purpose of political agitation) is also shown.

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