Czeskie „carmina clericorum” w źródłach polskich: przypadek pieśni „O Maria, mater Christi” / „O Maryja, matko Boża”
The Bohemian ‘carmina clericorum’ in Polish Sources: The Case of ‘O Maria, mater Christi’ / ‘O Maryja, matko Boża’

Summary/Abstract: The song O Maryja, matko Boża [O Mary, Mother of God], setting a Polish translation of the Latin text O Maria, mater Christi, survives in one unique copy in the Marian volume of the Tarnów Gradual, now held in Cieszyn Library (Książnica Cieszyńska, ms. DD I 28). Its Latin version, composed in the late fourteenth century in Bohemia and attributed to Záviš of Zápy, belongs to a repertoire created by mediaeval scholars, characterised by a specific style (alternating melismatic and syllabic segments), form (drawing on the genres of the sequence and leich / lai) and text type (with elements of prayer). This repertoire has recently been described and published in a critical edition prepared from Silesian, German and Bohemian sources by Jan Ciglbauer (Carmina clericorum, 2020). Other sources of the ‘cantilena’ O Maria, mater Christi include three from the Lesser Poland (Małopolska) region: a Wawel Cathedral antiphoner (ms. 48), a gradual in the Jagiellonian Library (ms. 1267) and the above-mentioned Tarnów Gradual (in both Latin and Polish). In the antiphoner we also find the second section or ‘strophe’ of this song, only known from two other sources (a Lübeck troper and a hymnbook from Środa Śląska), which bears a striking resemblance to the poem Cum iubemur et tenemur, preserved in a fifteenth-century manuscript from Wrocław (now London, British Library, Add. 18922). In manuscripts 1267 and DD I 28, the first section of the text contains interpolations not known from Bohemian and German sources, but which can also be found in the Polish-language version in the song O Maryja, matko Boża. The Polish text is not a faithful rendering of the Latin contained in the same Cieszyn manuscript; rather, it seems that the translator used a different variant of the text. This suggests that the Polish-language version of the song found in Gradual DD I 28 was not written specially for the needs of the Tarnów collegiate, but was more widely disseminated in the Polish ecclesiastical tradition.

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