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This article places into a broader scope of the research over the image of Gdańsk and its inhabitants in chronicles that are carried out by the authoress. It deals with the analysis of the historiographical sources originating from beyond Gdańsk. The majority of chronicles’ excerpts dedicated to Gdańsk deals with its political and trade activity. The authoress is particularly interested in the criteria, put forward by the chroniclers from 15th to 16th c., which decided on Gdańsk’s urban character, or indicated its value as a city and made it worth a visit. It was a period of intense development of this centre. The purpose of the analyses is to, i.a., check whether the contemporary chroniclers observed these changes and how they evaluated them. The issue has not yet been addressed in the literature of the subject. The analyses, referring to Hans Werner-Goetz’s methodology concerning the representations in chronicles (so-called Vorstellungsgeschichte), were carried out on various chronicles, relations and records, i.a. travel records (Gilbert de Lannoy and Mikołaj Wimann), Polish chronicles (Annales by Jan Długosz, chronicles by Bernard Wapowski, Joachim Bielski, Polonia by Marcin Kromer), foreign chronicles Germania by Eneas Silvius Piccolomini, Wandalia by Albert Krantz), or universal chronicles (Cosmographia by Sebastian Münster). The analysis shows that in the first half of the 15th century the contemporaneous authors did not stand out of other towns in the region (Jan Długosz, Gilbert de Lannoy, Eneas Silvius Piccolomini). Their assessment was made while they pondered on the city’s fortifications, geographical location and building material. It was not until the Thirteen Years War (1454–1466) and subsequent expansion of the city that the chronicles of the 16th c. noticed the ongoing change (especially Albrecht Krantz and Sebastian Münster). They described the “civilizational leap” that took place in Gdańsk in short time, namely during the life of one man. In their opinion, the changes were particularly noticeable in the fast pace of replacing wooden buildings with brick ones. The image of Gdańsk in the foreign chronicles does not contain elements of the descriptions of the city characteristic of Gdańsk records, which the authoress analyzed elsewhere – there are no references to specific buildings, streets and squares, that is, the living space of the city’s inhabitants.
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The representation of Silesian cities during the late Middle Ages and early modern times combines illustrative and textual elements. Both of these elements are subject to certain rules typical of the poetics of the so-called laudation. The representation (imagery) of each of the analyzed cities (the analysis in this case concerns mainly the capital of Lower Silesia – Wrocław) has a corona muralis, along with significant dominant profiles, which are naturally the church towers and the town hall. The towers of Nysa in the image of Hartmann Schedel are associated with the idea of Flemish belfries. Since the time of Hartmann Schedel’s Chronicle of 1493 the vedutas have also been provided with a commentary, fulfilling the functions of a classical laudation that praises the city’s good natural location, the beautiful shape and power of its founder. The image and text from Hartmann Schedel’s Chronicle may be compared with the famous description of the city of Wroclaw by Barthel Stein of 1512. The least-known, if one of the oldest, image of Wroclaw is the panorama with John of Capistrano in the background of 1503; it refers to the view from Weltchronik of 1493 only to some extent, though presenting a more symbolic, sacred character. On the other hand, the picture of Wrocław made in 1537 during the trip of the Palatine Ottheinrich from Neuburg on the Danube to Cracow is more impressive, although symbolic elements also appear here. The view of the city of 1562 should be described as a picture of the ideal town, made for specific political reasons. In turn, the first measurement plan of Wroclaw by Frederick Groβ of 1579 and the view of Wroclaw from the volume of Braun and Hogenberg of 1572–1618 should be considered the typical Renaissance plan of the consciously inventory-like character. The plan of Frederick Groβ expresses the idea of the modularity of the city consisting of sacral buildings and rectangular building blocks. It can be compared with Legnica’s plans from the beginning of the 18th century. The text of Braun and Hogenberg’s volume can be regarded as an early example of comparative urban planning. The veduta of Lwówek, created in the 17th century, should be considered to be close to the medieval paintings of a perfectly protected city.
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Peter Mundy (1596 – ca. 1667), one of the most representative English travellers of his period, visited Gdańsk (Danzig) and Toruń (Thorn) in 1640 and 1642 and described these cities in his Relations. The article includes deliberations concerning Mundy’s descriptions of the two most important cities in Royal Prussia in the context of early modern theory of ekphrasis and the eulogy of the city, represented especially by manuals of preliminary exercises in rhetoric (progymnasmata) and chapters from De inventione et amplificatione oratoria by Gerard Bucoldianus included in Reinhard Lorich’s Scholia attached to his edition of Aphthonius’ Progymnasmata, one of the most popular rhetoric books in the second half of 16th and in 17th centuries. The analysis of the structure and contents of Mundy’s “relations” leads to the conclusion that the English traveller was aware of the early modern theory of description and eulogy of cities but, at the same time, his curiosity made him free to leave the theoretical rules aside and focus himself on interesting technical constructions (“The great Organs in the Pfarrekerke” in Gdańsk or the Toruń bridge) or customs of burghers (“execution of Justice” and “Recreations” in Gdańsk and “A greatt faire” in Toruń).
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The article discusses the military triumph of the Crown Field Hetman Stanisław Żółkiewski, which took place in November 1611 in Warsaw during the General Sejm, as against a similar ceremony in 1583. Both of those events crowned the war struggle with the Muscovite state and were closely associated with the Polish-Lithuanian triumphs over the eastern neighbour. In both cases, those spectacles constituted the crowning achievement of long-standing fights. Triumphs were organized in Cracow and Warsaw, and its spectators were the country’s political elites gathered at the wedding of Jan Zamoyski with Gryzelda Batory (1583) and participants of the Sejm. One can also indicate a wider audience, which was the noble society, because the propaganda activities undertaken by Stefan Batory and Sigismund III Vasa were to bring not only desired short-term results, e.g. introducing taxes for the continuation of the war with Muscovy, but also long-term effects by shaping political attitudes desired in a given moment. In both cases, the originators of the triumphal marches could obtain information from one of the chapters of Hetman’s Books of Stanisław Sarnicki. The author collected there the most important comments related to the organization of such marches. Żółkiewski’s triumph was closely related to the capture of the Smolensk fortress and the defeat of the Muscovite army near Kłuszyn in 1610. Those events gave rise to the organization of another triumph, but this time not of the king himself, but of the hetman. It was to be used primarily as an argument for the nobility sitting in parliament to pass the taxes necessary for further warfare. The analysis and comparison of both celebrations show that much greater effort was put into organizing the Cracow events of 1583. Their artistic and ideological setting was given great attention to detail. Twenty-eight years later, participants and observers of the Warsaw triumph did not experience similar impressions. Neither the king nor his entourage took care of preparing the scenario of the ceremony, music or elements of occasional architecture, etc. Many people took part in the Cracow events: dancers, musicians, actors, soldiers and exotic animals. In 1611, the triumph in Warsaw was extremely simple. Not much attention was paid to the preparations. The course of events shows the animosities between Sigismund III and Stanisław Żółkiewski along with the lack of a unified position towards the Muscovite state. The article was supplemented with a critical source edition of one of the descriptions of the events of 1611. The text is stored in a collection of manuscript documents – the so called “miscellanea” in the Czartoryski Library in Cracow. The author of this account is unknown, although he probably witnessed the Warsaw triumph, which is indicated, for example, by detailed descriptions of the appearance of Muscovite prisoners of war.
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The article concerns the presence of nature in pre-industrial towns. I address here the problems I encountered when recreating the urban layout of Dolsk, an averagesized town in Greater Poland belonging to the bishops of Poznan in the Old Polish period, at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries. This problem concerned showing the socio-economic character of the city. The reproduction constitutes part of Greater Poland’s volume of the series of the Historical Atlas of Poland. The search for the presence of nature in cities was based on a query in written sources from the first half of the 17th century and on the basis of the oldest known and preserved city map from the end of the 18th century. The reference to natural elements in Dolsk is associated with the presence of home gardens, which constitute a kind of natural arrangement. Most often they appear when describing a real estate that was the subject of purchase/sale transactions between burghers of Dolsk or when loans were secured on a real estate. Gardens were located on plots, which constituted the basic unit of the ownership division of the urban space. However, they were not always mentioned in the descriptions of transactions. Most often they appeared at the houses that were built on plots limited from the back by the lakes surrounding Dolsk or passed into suburban areas. However, also in the case of plots that bordered with other plots from the back, one may find information about the presence of a garden on such a plot. The presence of gardens at the back of the plots in Dolsk was also registered on the oldest preserved city map of 1794–1796. Both this fact and the forwarding of elements of nature inside town walls on plans of perspective towns from the early modern period means that marking gardens on the reconstruction of the spatial arrangement seems necessary, especially in the case of towns of the size and character of Dolsk. This makes it necessary to reflect upon the methodology of creating historical maps of old towns. The simplest solution would be to create a generalized, simplified visualization of the urban space based on data taken from the oldest town plan, but not merely from a simple redrawing of the border between the residential-economic zone and the garden zone. However, not being able to mark these borders precisely on the basis of data from written sources from the 17th century, one should adopt a conventional method of marking these zones. However, this requires further reflection on the methodological concepts of modern cartography and their use to create historical maps showing the reconstruction of spatial systems of towns in the pre-industrial period. It seems that further work on a similar way of marking the space of urban plots in average-size and small towns will allow to develop a model of cartographic presentation that will better reflect the character of the space of towns such as Dolsk.
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Resumen: La importancia de preservar el legado incaico y de incluirlo en la definición de la identidad nacional peruana es evidente en las obras de Manuel González Prada y Ricardo Palma, que, a través de la descripción de los incas, consiguen transmitir a las generaciones presentes y futuras un testimonio de la cultura y civilización incaicas. A pesar de la polémica entre ambos autores, existen también rasgos comunes en cuanto al interés de estos para indagar sobre la realidad de la historia del pueblo peruano y ofrecer soluciones tanto para la recuperación de la cultura y civilización incaica como para la integración de la población indígena en la definición de la identidad nacional peruana, basándose como una de las fuentes fundamentales en los Comentarios Reales del Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. Abstract: The importance of preserving the Inca legacy and including it in the definition of the Peruvian national identity is obvious in the writings of Manuel González Prada and Ricardo Palma, who,through the description of the Inca, succeed to transmit to the present and future generations a testimony of the Inca culture and civilization. Despite the controversy between the two authors, there are also common characteristics in what concerns their interest to investigate the reality of Peruvian people’s history, and offer solutions for the recovery of the Inca culture and civilization, as well as the integration of the indigenous people in the definition of the Peruvian national identity, basing themselves on the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s Comentarios Reales as one of the most important sources.
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When speaking of Reformation and Humanism, we tend to connect them to each other. But as we come closer to the essence of each, we discover their substantially different nature. The gist of Humanism is the human nature. On statues and paintings of the Renaissance the man is portrayed as a great, powerful, almost almighty person. On the other hand, Reformation places God, Christ, salvation, reconciliation etc. at the centre of its teaching. Humans are included too, but only as sideliners, as weak, infirm, needy, helpless figures. Nevertheless, Reformation has benefited to a significant extent from Humanism via its emphasis on the grammar for mastering the languages of the Scripture (Hebrew and Greek), dialectics striving to a better understanding of the scriptural message, and rhetorics as a substantial technical help spreading the Gospel. Therefore, teaching these disciplines at the universities of the Reformation has become of major importance during the 16th century.
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The research undertaken in the article is put in the context of the social, administrative and economic transformations undergone by Chełmno (Kulm), which had been a bishop’s town since 1505. These changes also had a significant impact on the organisation of the town’s chancery, which carried out tasks and duties entrusted by municipal authorities. This was reflected in an increase in the number of town officials working in the chancery, to which court secretaries belonged. They formed a professional group, which was characterised by their economic, political and cultural activity against the background of Chełmno community in the early modern period. The main research objective of the article is to create a comprehensive picture of the social environment of Chełmno town chancery from the sixteenth century until 1772, the personnel of which constituted the intellectual elite of the town, and to present the characteristic traits of this group. At the same time, the text presents the profiles of town secretaries and clerks previously unknown or rarely mentioned in the scholarly literature. Methods applied in the research involve critical analysis of the preserved town books and individual documents, both manuscript and edited. On the basis of data collected from the primary sources, a prosopographical analysis has also been conducted. The result of the studies is an overview picture of the professional group formed by the secretaries and clerks of early modern Chełmno, which includes their social origins, family ties, non-professional activity and wealth.
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First and foremost, the Protestantism sought to incorporate the first three disciplines of the seven liberal arts into the methodologies of scholarly theology and the curricula of school education. It also served the purpose of preparing seminary students for preaching the Word in their mother-tongue. Once they mastered the languages of the Two Testaments, dialectics (or logic) aided them in decoding the meaning (or the message) of the passage, while rhetorics guided them in composing a structurally sound sermon. (This threefold unity is still applied today in Hungarian theological education, albeit under a different name.) Dialectics is the foundation for the study of all sciences. Indeed, the potential benefits of certain scientific disciplines cannot be fully achieved without a thorough understanding of its principles. Therefore, as religious sermons are modelled after secular rhetoric, their structural features cannot be correctly assembled without resorting to the laws of philosophical dialectics.
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While approaching a well-researched topic, that of the fortified churches of Transylvania, the scope of this article is to look for possible answers to the question why the Saxons built so many fortified churches in Transylvania. For their number seems to be larger here than in other European states. To find these answers I examined the local topography, historic context (the Mongol invasion and the later battles with the Ottomans), typology, stages of building, identity and culture of the builders (Saxons), the role played by the church/religion at the time.
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Review of: Andrea Kovács: Monuments of Medieval Liturgical Poetry in Hungary. Sequences – Critical edition of melodies. Musica Sacra Hungarica 1 Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music – Church Music Research Group – Argumentum Publishing House, Budapest 2017, 735 s. ISSN 2498-9185. ISBN 978-963-7181-55-9
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In the assessment of liturgical musical codices from the territory of Slovakia dating from the medieval period and the early modern period, the town of Nitra has a special status. From Nitra’s church institutional funds only one liturgical manuscript has been preserved in its original place – the Nitra Codex from the 12th century (ekphonetic symbols, elements of German adiastematic neume notation). From the subsequent period (12th to 16th centuries) religious books with notation have not been preserved. All the more surprising, then, is the discovery of 7 antiphonary fragments from the turn of the 16th century with the Esztergom notation system in the Nitra Diocesan Archive, which is one of the oldest church archives in the Slovak Republic. On account of the historic status of the Nitra diocese and its church archive, we regard the finding of these fragments as an exceptional discovery in the field of medieval musical research in Slovakia.
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This paper considers the phenomenon of personal identity development and democratization of the history of Russia during the Time of Troubles. D.S. Likhachev’s opinion on the discovery of a personality in the Russian literature of the 17th century is discussed. It is demonstrated that the problem of personal identity in the socio-political space of Russia was raised for the first time during the Time of Troubles. Hunger, devastation, deprivation, underestimation of the value of human life paradoxically promoted the development of a view on the personal identity as an important element of life. The historical and anthropological problem of studying the formation and development of self-identification in Russia under the influence of destructive and tragic events of the Time of Troubles is formulated. The above problem can be solved by carrying out a mass biographical research based on numerous sources and using the methods of prosopography and historical anthropology. The unremitting wars that took place in the second half of the 16th century favored the development of personal identity at the public level. A generation of nobles accustomed to making decisions under the war conditions emerged. In the Time of Troubles, other social groups adopted the behavioral strategies of the nobility. As a result, imposture, unregulated (both traditionally and legally) leadership in the Cossack hosts, robber gangs, and self-organized grouping became common. Under these circumstances, people were willing to actively participate in the events of the Time of Troubles and in the changes of the political course. Therefore, the historical sources confirm that the history of Russia exhibited the first sings of democratization during the Time of Troubles.
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The subject of article is the history of the musical and poetic composition of the Christmas sticheron “Σήμερον ὁ Χριστός” by Johann Damascene with the Gospel quotation “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, and good will toward men” (Lk. 2:14), as well as the circle of associated stichera in Byzantine, Old Russian and Kiev-Lithuanian traditions. The musical text of the hymns is represented in Greek manuscripts by Chartres, Coislin and middle-Byzantine neumes; Old Russian chant books were analyzed using znamenny neumes and singer notation; and Kiev manuscripts - using Kievan five-line notation records. The melody of the Christmas sticheron emphasizes the importance of the Gospel quotation with long melismatic musical fragments of the quotation itself and the previous sentence. This sticheron became a model for several hymns to Epiphany, Purification of the Most Holy Mother of God, Annunciation and Entry into the Temple of the Most Holy Mother of God, the majority of which were excluded from liturgical use. There are various ways of creating a new sticheron based on the model: prosomoion may be a calque or an independent composition with certain elements of model tune. The latter case of the sticheron to the Entry into the Temple “Σήμερον τῷ ναῷ προσάγεται” has its own musical text history in three traditions, independent from that of the model. Chants of Old Russian manuscripts of 11th-14th centuries are similar to those of a Byzantine origin, but in the 15th-17th centuries the music of these two traditions has developed in different ways. The Kievan chant tradition, similar to both Old Russian and Byzantine ones, is a point of intersection of chant cultures.
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