Jan Polack

From his nickname it is assumed that he might have been born and/or worked in Kraków. From the mid-1470s on, he lived and worked in Munich, having previously been in Franconia. He may have taken part in he 1475 festival of the Landshut Wedding of Jadwiga Jagiellon and George of Bavaria. In 1480 he opened his own shop in Munich, where he remained until his death.


Starting in 1482 he is listed on the tax records of Munich, also as leader of the local painter guild. He visited with Michael Wohlgemuth and his art was influenced by him and by that of Veit Stoss and Hans Pleydenwurff as well as by collaboration with the woodcutter Erasmus Grasser.


Documents mention many works of his which are now lost. His most important remaining work is the Weihenstephan altarpiece (1483–1485), now at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich.

Ols | Mszarna (full album)

The Gods of the Ancient Slavs by Myroslava T. Znayenko

This is a great book on the old Slavic religion, it's an important, scholarly work that is available online for free from Slavica:

https://slavica.indiana.edu/system/tdf/bookContent_pdf/08_SLAVICA%20REISSUE_Gods%20of%20the%20Ancient%20Slavs.pdf?file=1&type=node&id=634&force=

Apollo in Poznan

Perun | Slavic God of Thunder

Perun, the thunder god of the ancient pagan Slavs, a fructifier, purifier, and overseer of right and order. His actions are perceived by the senses: seen in the thunderbolt, heard in the rattle of stones, the bellow of the bull, or the bleat of the he-goat (thunder), and felt in the touch of an ax blade. The word for Thursday (Thor’s day) in the Polabian language was peründan. Polish piorun and Slovak parom denote “thunder” or “lightning.”

The lightning god and his cult among the Slavs is attested by the Byzantine historian Procopius in the 6th century. In The Russian Primary Chronicle, compiled c. 1113, Perun is mentioned as having been invoked in the treaties of 945 and 971, and his name is the first in the list of gods of St. Vladimir’s pantheon of 980. He was worshiped in oak groves by western Slavs, who called him Prone, which name appears in Helmold’s Chronica Slavorum (c. 1172). Porenut, Perun’s son, is mentioned by the Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus in the early 13th century.

In the Christian period the worship of Perun was gradually transferred to St. Elijah (Russian Iliya), but in folk beliefs, his fructifying, life-stimulating, and purifying functions are still performed by his vehicles: the ax, the bull, the he-goat, the dove, and the cuckoo. Sacrifices and communal feasts on July 20 in honour of Perun or Iliya continued in Russia until modern times.

©2017 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Michał Piotr Boym

Michał Piotr Boym (Chinese: 卜彌格; pinyin: Bǔ Mígé; c. 1612–1659) was a Polish Jesuit missionary to China, scientist and explorer.

He is notable as one of the first westerners to travel within the Chinese mainland, and the author of numerous works on Asian fauna, flora and geography.


Boym authored the first published Chinese dictionaries for European languages, both of which were published posthumously: the first, a Chinese–Latin dictionary, was published in 1667, and the second, a Chinese–French dictionary, was published in 1670.

Michał Boym was born in Lwów, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine), around 1614, to a well-off family of Hungarian ancestry. His grandfather Jerzy Boim came to Poland from Hungary with the king Stefan Batory, and married Jadwiga Niżniowska.M father, Paweł Jerzy Boim (1581–1641), was a physician to King Sigismund III of Poland. Out of Pawel Jerzy's six sons, the eldest, the ne'er-do-well Jerzy was disinherited; Mikołaj and Jan became merchants; Paweł, a doctor; while Michał and Benedykt Paweł joined the Society of Jesus. The family had their own family chapel in Lviv's central square, which was constructed around the time of Michał's birth.

In 1631, Boym joined the Jesuits in Kraków, and was ordained a priest. In 1643, after almost a decade of intensive studies in the monasteries of Kraków, Kalisz, Jarosław and Sandomierz, Boym embarked on a voyage to Eastern Asia. He first traveled to Rome, where he obtained a blessing for his mission from Pope Urban VIII, and then proceeded to Lisbon. Later that year he embarked with a group of nine other priests and clerics on a voyage to Portuguese Goa, and then Macau. Initially he taught at St. Paul Jesuit College (Macau). He then moved to the island of Hainan, where he opened a small Catholic mission. After the island had been conquered by the Manchus, Boym had to flee to Tonkinin 1647.


Even as Jesuits in northern and central China were successfully switching their loyalties from the fallen Ming Dynasty to the newly established Qing, the Jesuits in the south of the country continued to work with the Ming loyalist regimes still controlling some of the region. Accordingly, in 1649 Boym was sent by the Canton-based Vice-Provincial of the China Mission Alvaro Semedo with a diplomatic mission to the court of the Yongli Emperor, the last Chinese ruler of the Ming Dynasty, still controlling parts of the Southwestern China.


As the Yongli regime was endangered by the encroaching Manchus, the Jesuit Andreas Wolfgang Koffler, who had been at the Yongli court since 1645, had succeeded in converting many of the members of the imperial family to Christianity believing this would attract help from Western monarchs for the Southern Ming's struggle to continue to rule China. Among the Christians at the Yongli's court were Empress dowager Helena Wang (Wang Liena), the wife of the emperor's father; Empress dowager Maria Ma (Ma Maliya), the mother of the emperor; and the heir to the throne, prince Constantine (Dangding), Zhu Cuxuan.[3] The Emperor's eunuch secretary Pang Tianshou (龐天壽), known by his Christian name Achilles, had become a Christian as well, years earlier.


Boym was chosen to present the situation of the Chinese Emperor to the Pope. He received letters from Empress dowager Helena and from Pang Achilles, to give to Pope Innocent X, the General of the Jesuit Order, and Cardinal John de Lugo. Additional letters were dispatched to the Doge of Venice and to the King of Portugal. Together with a young court official named Andrew Zheng (Chinese: 鄭安德勒; pinyin: Zhèng Āndélè),[1 Boym embarked on his return voyage to Europe. They arrived at Goa in May 1651, where they learned that the King of Portugal had already abandoned the cause of the Chinese (Southern Ming) Emperor, and that Boym's mission was seen as a possible threat to future relations with the victorious Manchu. This view was also supported by the new local superior of the Jesuits, who believed the Jesuit Order should not interfere in the internal power struggles of China.


Boym was placed under house arrest. However, he managed to escape and continue his voyage on foot. By way of Hyderabad, Surat, Bander Abbas and Shiraz, he arrived at Isfahan, in Persia. From there he continued his journey to Erzerum, Trabzon and İzmir, where he arrived near the end of August 1652. As the Venetian court was having conflicts with the Jesuits, Boym discarded his habit and dressed up as a Chinese Mandarin, before he arrived in Venice in December of that year. Although he had managed to cross uncharted waters and unknown lands, his mission there would not be easy, as the political intrigues at the European courts proved to be extremely complicated.


Initially the Doge of Venice refused to grant Boym an audience, as Venice wanted to maintain a neutral stance in regards to China. Boym managed to convince the French ambassador to support his cause, and the Doge finally saw Boym and accepted the letter. However, the French involvement caused a negative reaction from the Pope, as Innocent X was actively opposed to France and its ambitions. Also the newly elected General of the Jesuits, Gosvinus Nickel, believed Boym's mission might endanger other Jesuit missions in China and other parts of the world. A new Pope was elected in 1655, and after three years, Alexander VII finally saw Boym on December 18, 1655. However, although Alexander was sympathetic to the Ming dynasty and its dilemma, he could not offer any practical help and his letter to the Chinese emperor contained little but words of empathy and offers of prayers. However, the letter from the new Pope opened many doors for Boym and his mission. In Lisbon, he was granted an audience by King John IV, who promised to help the Chinese struggle with military force.


In March 1656, Boym started his return trip to China. Out of eight priests accompanying him, only four survived the journey. Upon reaching Goa it turned out that Yongli's situation was dire and that the local Portuguese administration, despite direct orders from the monarch, did not want to let Boym travel to Macau. This was in order not to compromise their commercial enterprises with the victorious Manchu. Boym again ignored the Portuguese monopoly by travelling on foot, this time by an uncharted route to Ayutthaya, the capital of Siam. He arrived there in early 1658, and hired a ship from pirates, with which he sailed to what is now northern Vietnam. In Hanoi, Boym tried to procure a guide to lead him and the priests travelling with him to Yunnan. However, he was unsuccessful and he had to continue the journey alone, with the assistance only of Chang, who had travelled with him all the way to Europe and back. They reached the Chinese province of Guangxi, but on June 22, 1659 Boym died, before reaching the emperor's court. The location of where he was buried is not known today.

Before Marco Polo | Benedykt Polak

Benedict of Poland (Latin: Benedictus Polonus, Polish Benedykt Polak) (ca. 1200 – ca. 1280) was a Polish Franciscan friar, traveler, explorer, and interpreter.


He accompanied Giovanni da Pian del Carpine in his journey as delegate of Pope Innocent  IV to the Great Khan Güyük of the Mongol Empire in 1245-1247. He was the author of the brief chronicle De Itinere Fratrum Minorum ad Tartaros (On the travel of Franciscan friars to the Tatars), published only in the 1839 in France (and a year later in Poland) and a longer work Historia Tartarorum (The history of the Tatars), discovered and published only in 1965 by the academics of Yale University. This journey preceded that of Marco Polo.
The report of Benedict is important because it includes a copy of the letter of the Great Khan to the Pope.
Little is known about the life of Friar Benedykt beyond the story of the journey. He was educated and  fluent in  Latin. He had become a monk in the Franciscan monastery in Wroclaw about 1236. This was the first major stop of Friar Giovanni after leaving on the mission from Lyon in April 1245. Benedict was chosen to accompany him as an interpreter because he had also acquired a knowledge of the Old East Slavic language and the first part of their journey was to Kiev. Benedict made his accounts of the journey during and after their return in 1247. After returning from the voyage he settled in the Franciscan monastery in Kraków where he spent the rest of his life. Later he was also a witness at the canonization of Saint Stanislaus of Szczepanów in 1252.

The Russian and the Polish Soul | by N.A. Berdyaev

I

         The old quarrel within the Slavic family, the quarrel of the Russians with the Polish, cannot be explained merely by the external forces of history and the external political reasons. The sources of the age-old historical dispute of Russia and Poland lie deeper. And at present it is especially important for us to be aware of the spiritual causes of this hostility and antagonism, which divides the Slavic world. This is a dispute first of all between two Slavic souls, kindred by blood and by language, with traits of ethnos common to all the Slavs yet so very different, almost opposites, compatible but with difficulty, incapable of understanding each the other. Peoples that are kindred and close tend less so to be capable of understanding each other and are moreso antagonistic towards each other, than those remote and foreign. The kindred tongue sounds odd and seems a corruption of one's own language. In family life also it is possible to observe this antagonism between the close and the impossibility of understanding one another. For outsiders, much is forgiven, but for one's own there is no desire to forgive anything... And no one seems so foreign and unpleasant, as one's own and near.

         The Russians and the Polish have fought not only over territory and their different feel towards life. Outwardly -- the Russians historically have come out on top in this age old struggle, they not only warded off the danger of the polonisation of the Russian people, but they also aggressively set upon the Polish people and made attempts at its russification. The polish state was broken apart and divided, but the Polish soul was preserved, and with a still greater intensity the Polish national visage was expressed. The great spiritual upsurge, voiced in Polish messianism, came about already after the destruction of the Polish state. The Polish people, so little capable at building a state, was endowed though with features individualistic and anarchistic, and proved spiritually strong and indestructible. And there is no other people in the world, endowed with so intense a national feeling. The Polish are completely not given to assimilation. And it is with the Polish namely that the idea of a nationalism messianism has reached its highest upsurge and intensity. The Polish have conveyed into the world the idea of a sacrificial messianism. And the Russian messianism always has to seem to the Polish as something non-sacrificial, greedy, with pretensions to seizing territory. After the war, much has to change in the external, the state fortunes of Poland, and it is already impossible to return to the old repression of it. The outward relationships of Russia and Poland will tend to  fundamentally change. Russia is aware, that it has to redeem its historical guilt regarding Poland. But the Russian and the Polish souls all still remain the opposite of each other, as terribly foreign, infinitely different, incomprehensible each for the other. The Polish-Russian question is posited by both the Polish and the Russians too externally, on the political plane, and its resolution vacillates depending upon the fluctuations of political intents and military successes. The liberation of Poland would make possible a genuine communion between Poland and Russia, a genuine rapport between the Polish and the Russians, which up til now the repression of Poland has impeded. But what inwardly has to be done for such a communion and rapport? To outward promises the Polish relate suspiciously. At present these historical suspicions are baseless, but psychologically the Polish have quite much basis for them. Spiritually however very little is done for any rapport with the Polish. But I should want to draw special attention to this, that in Polish-Russian relations there is a deeper, a spiritual side. Only a genuine understanding can be liberating, it frees one from any initial negative feelings, and tends to familiarise both us, as Russians, and the Polish, as to why it is always so difficult for the Russian soul to be fond of the Polish soul, and why the Polish soul relates with such suspiciousness towards the Russian soul? Why so foreign and so incomprehensible to each other are these two Slavic souls? Inside the Slavic world has occurred the clash of East and West. The Slavic West has felt itself more civilised, a bearer of unified European culture. And the Slavic East has opposed to the West its own particular spiritual type of culture and life.

II

         I have always thought, that the dispute of Russia and Poland is, first of all, a dispute of the Orthodox soul and the Catholic soul. And within the Slavic world this clash between the Orthodox and Catholic souls has assumed an especial acuteness. Russia historically has been wont to preserve its Orthodox soul and its unique spiritual inheritance against the Western side. In the past, polonisation and latinisation of the Russian people would have been to the ruin of its spiritual self-existence, its national visage. Poland descended upon the Russian East with a sense of its own cultural superiourity. The Russian spiritual type seemed to the Polish not some other spiritual type, but simply a lower and non-cultural condition. The historical struggle of Russia with Poland had a positive significance, and the spiritual uniqueness of the Russian people was affirmed in it forever. The memory of this struggle has left in the souls of both peoples traces so deep, that at present it is difficult to be free of it. Russia grew into a colossus, both as a state, and likewise spiritually, and long since already the fomenting of passions over the Polish danger, just like the Catholic danger, has become shameful and insulting to the dignity of the Russian people. It ill becomes a strong offender to shout about the danger posed by the weaker, the already crushed. At present Russia has facing it tasks creative, and not of oppressive preservation. Russian politics regarding Poland long since already has become historical a relic, connected with the remote past and presenting no opportunity to create for the future. In this mindless politics the guilty one ought not to be forgiving the one, before whom he is guilty. This is something within the realm of external state politics. In the sphere however of the inwardly spiritual there is still hindrance for the Russian soul in approaching the Polish soul by a feeling of foreignness and hostility, evoked by the Latin Catholic engrafting onto the Slavic soul, constituting the Polish national visage. To the self-absorbed Russian soul, having received its own powerful Orthodox engrafting, much is not only foreign and incomprehensible in the Polish, but disagreeable, repelling and arousing of hostility. And even Russian people having fallen away from Orthodoxy remain Orthodox as regards their spiritual type, and it is all the more difficult for them to understand Catholic culture and the spiritual type, nurtured upon its soil. German Protestantism has been less repellant for Russian man, and this has been a genuine misfortune for the fate of Russia.

         In the typical Russian soul there is much simplicity, directness and a lack of cunning, foreign to it is every affectation, every overwrought pathos, every aristocratic ambition, all the gesturing. This soul -- readily falls and sins, yet repenting even to the point of morbidity it remains conscious of its own insignificance before the face of God. Within it there is some sort of an especial, altogether non-Western democratism upon religious grounds, a thirst for the salvation of all the people. Everything remains in the depths for the Russian people, and it is not wont to express itself in a plastically facile manner. In Russian man there is so little a sense of discipline, an orderly soul, a tempering of person, he is not extended out upwards, in the stuff of his soul there is nothing of the Gothic. Russian man expects, that God Himself will set order to his soul and arrange his life. In its utmost manifestations the Russian soul -- is a wanderer, seeking for the City not here present and awaiting its descent from Heaven. The Russian people in its lower aspects is immersed in the chaotic, still pagan earthly element. But at its summits it lives in apocalyptic expectations, it thirsts for the absolute and is not ready to settle for anything relative. Altogether different is the Polish soul. The Polish soul -- is aristocratic and individualistic to the point of morbidity, in it so powerful is not only the sense of honour, connected with the knight-chivalrant culture unknown to Russia, but also an obdurate ambition. This is the most refined and elegant soul within Slavdom, drowning in its own suffering fate. Pathetic to the point of affectation. The mannerisms of the Polish soul always strike Russians as artificially elegant and sweet, lacking in simplicity and directness, and repelling in its sense of superiourity and suspiciousness, of which the Polish are not free. The Polish have always seemed lacking in a sense of the equality of human souls before God, of brotherhood in Christ, as connected with the acknowledging of the infinite value of each human soul. The unique spiritual aspect of the Polish nobility has poisoned Polish life and played a fateful role in its state destiny. Russian man is little capable of such scorn, he does not love to give another man the feeling, that he is lower than him. Russian man is proud in his humility. The Polish soul however draws upward. This -- is the Catholic spiritual type. The Russian soul prostrates itself stretched down before God. This -- is the Orthodox spiritual type. With the Polish there is a love for affectation. With the Russians however there is altogether no affectation. In the Polish soul there is an experiencing of the path of Christ, the sufferings of Christ, and the sacrifice on Golgotha. At the summits of the Polish spiritual life the fate of the Polish people is experienced, as the fate of the Lamb, offered in sacrifice for the sins of the world. Suchlike is Polish messianism, first of all sacrificial, not connected with state power, nor with success and dominance in the world... Hence there is born in the Polish soul the pathos of suffering and sacrifice. Everything is different in the Russian soul. The Russian soul is connected moreso with the intercession of the Mother of God, than with the path of Christ's sufferings, with the experience of the Golgotha sacrifice. In the Russian soul there is a genuine humility, but little of the sacrificial victim. The Russian soul devotes itself to a churchly collectivism, always connected for it with the Russian earth. In the Polish soul there is sensed a cramped oppositeness in the person, a capacity for suffering and an incapacity for humility. In the Polish soul there is always the venom of sufferings. The Dionysianism of the Russian soul is altogether different, not so bloody. In the Polish soul there is a terrible jealousy over women, a jealousy, often assuming repulsive a form, spasmodic and convulsive. This power of women, the slavishness of sex is sensed very powerfully in the contemporary Polish writers, Przybyszewski [Stanislaw Feliks, 1868-1927], Zeromski [alt. Zheromski, Stefan, 1864-1925], et al. In the Russian soul there is no such sort a slavery over women. Love plays less a role in Russian life and Russian literature than with the Polish. And Russian sensuality, with genius expressed by Dostoevsky, is altogether different, than with the Polish. The problem of women for the Polish is posited altogether differently than it is with the French -- this is a problem of suffering, and not of delight.

  

III

         In the soul of each people there are its strong and its weak sides, its qualities and its insufficiencies. But it is mutually necessary to love the qualities in the souls of the peoples and to forgive the deficiencies. Only then is possible a true interaction. Within the great Slavic world there ought to be both the Russian element and the Polish element. The historical quarrel is outmoded and finished, and there is beginning an era of reconciliation and unity. Many a contrary feature can be pointed out in the soul of the Polish people. But there can also show forth features in common to the Slavs, indicators of belonging to the selfsame ethnos. This common affinity is to be sensed at the summits of the spiritual life of the Russian and the Polish people, in the messianic consciousness. Both the Russian and the Polish messianic consciousness are bound up with Christianity, and alike it is filled with apocalyptic presentiments and expectations. The thirst for the kingdom of Christ upon earth, for the revelation of the Holy Spirit, is a Slavic thirst, a Russian and Polish thirst. Mickiewicz [Adam, 1798-1855] and Dostoevsky, Towianski [Andrzej Tomasz, 1799-1878] and Vl. Solov'ev tend to intersect on this. And justice demands the acknowledging, that Polish messianism is moreso pure and sacrificial, than is Russian messianism. There was many a sin in the old polish nobility, but these sins are redeemed by the sacrificial fate of the Polish people, by the Golgotha experienced by them. Polish messianism -- represents the blossoming of Polish spiritual culture -- it overcomes the Polish deficiencies and defects, it consumes them within the sacrificial fire. The old frivolous Poland with the magnate feasts, with the mazurka and the oppressed common people has found its rebirth in the suffering of Poland. But if the Polish messianic consciousness can be posited as higher than the Russian messianic consciousness, I still believe, that within the Russian people itself there is a more intense and pure thirsting for the truth of Christ and the kingdom of Christ upon earth, than there is in the Polish people. The national feeling has been crippled for us, as Russians, by our inward slavery, and for the Polish -- by their outward slavery. The Russian people ought to atone its guilt afront the polish people, to understand for it the strange of soul Poland and not regard as bad the dissimilar to its own spiritual sort. The polish people however ought to get a sense of and understand the soul of Russia, to free itself of the false and ugly contempt, whereby an other spiritual sort seems lower and uncultured. The Russian soul will remain Orthodox in the fundamentals of its type of soul, just as the Polish soul will remain Catholic. This is deeper and broader than Orthodoxy and Catholicism being mere faith-confessions, this -- is an uniqueness of the sense of life and uniqueness of the stuff of soul. But these differing souls of peoples are capable not only of understanding and loving each other, but can also sense their belonging to the same ethnic soul conceiving of its Slavic mission to the world.

  

                                                                     Nikolai Berdyaev
                                                               1914

©  2009  by translator Fr. S. Janos

(1914 - 178(15,18) - en)

RUSSKAYA  I  POL'SKAYA  DUSHA. First published in the newspaper "Birzhevye vedomosti", 10 Oct. 1914, No. 14610-14424, under title "Rossiya i Pol'sha" ["Russia and Poland"].  Republished thereafter in the 1918 Berdyaev's anthology text of articles, “Sud’ba Rossii” (“The Fate of Russia”), Sect. III,  Ch. 2,  (p. 361-366 in my 1997 Moscow Svarog reprint).

Jan Kochanowski | Polish Renaissance Poet

Jan Kochanowski
1530 - 1584
Polish Renaissance poet who established poetic patterns that would become integral to the Polish literary language.
He is commonly regarded as the greatest Polish poet before Adam Mickiewicz, and the greatest Slavic poet prior to the 19th century.

Kochanowski was born at Sycyna, near Radom, Poland. He was the elder brother of Andrzej Kochanowski who would also become a poet and translator. Little is known of his early education. At fourteen, fluent in Latin, he was sent to the Kraków Academy. After graduating in 1547 at age seventeen, he attended the University of Königsberg (Królewiec), in Ducal Prussia, and Padua University in Italy. At Padua, Kochanowski came in contact with the great humanist scholar Francesco Robortello. Kochanowski closed his fifteen-year period of studies and travels with a final visit to France, where he met the poet Pierre Ronsard.

In 1559 Kochanowski returned to Poland for good, where he remained active as a humanist and Renaissance poet. He spent the next fifteen years close to the court of King Sigismund II Augustus, serving for a time as royal secretary. In 1574, following the decampment of Poland's recently elected King Henry of Valois (whose candidacy to the Polish throne Kochanowski had supported), Kochanowski settled on a family estate at Czarnolas ("Blackwood") to lead the life of a country squire. In 1575 he married Dorota Podlodowska, with whom he had seven children.

Kochanowski is sometimes referred to in Polish as "Jan z Czarnolasu" ("John of Blackwood"). It was there that he wrote his most memorable works, including The Dismissal of the Greek Envoys and the Laments.

Kochanowski died, probably of a heart attack, in Lublin on 22 August 1584.

Kochanowski never ceased to write in Latin; however, his main achievement was the creation of Polish-language verse forms that made him a classic for his contemporaries and posterity.

His first major masterpiece was Odprawa posłów greckich (The Dismissal of the Greek Envoys, 1578; recently translated into English by Indiana University's Bill Johnston). This was a blank-verse tragedy that recounted an incident leading up to the Trojan War. It was the first tragedy written in Polish, and its theme of the responsibilities of statesmanship continues to resonate to this day. The play was performed at the wedding of Jan Zamoyski and Krystyna Radziwiłł at Ujazdów Castle in Warsaw on 12 January 1578.[5]

Kochanowski's best-known masterpiece is Treny (Threnodies, 1580). It is a series of nineteen elegies upon the death of his beloved two-and-a-half-year-old daughter Urszula (pet name Urszulka). It has been translated into English (as Laments) in 1920 by Dorothea Prall, and in 1995 by Stanisław Barańczak and Seamus Heaney.

Other well-known poems by Kochanowski are Proporzec albo hołd pruski (The Banner, or the Prussian Homage), the satiric poem Zgoda (Accord) published in 1564, and the merry Fraszki (Epigrams, published 1584), reminiscent of the Decameron. His translation of the Psalms is highly regarded. He also wrote in Latin, examples being Lyricorum libellus (Little Book of Lyrics, 1580), Elegiarum libri quatuor (Four Books of Elegies, 1584), and numerous poems composed for special occasions. He greatly enriched Polish poetry by naturalizing foreign poetic forms, which he knew how to imbue with a national spirit.

His writings were published collectively for the first time at Cracow in 1584–90, but the so-called jubilee publication, which appeared in Warsaw in 1884, is better. Many of his poems were translated into German by H. Nitschmann (1875).