An Ambiguous Golden Age

Nowakowska, Natalia

doi:10.4324/9780203709788-3

Remembering the Jagiellonians 2018

DOI: 10.4324/9780203709788-3

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An Ambiguous Golden Age

Natalia Nowakowska¹

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“…82 Throughout his reign, Sigismund III and his supporters, in chapels and mausoleums, royal entries, political pamphlets, Jesuit drama, letters and pageantry performed and mythologised the idea of a 'Jagiellonian line', and Sigismund's sons continued this tradition well into the 1650s. 83 From 1572 onwards, we thus see that in the absence of actual Jagiellonians to succeed to the throne (male or female), the rhetoric of a specific, named, extinct royal family became (in their place) a major and novel source of potential legitimacy in itself. The humanist-invented decorative name, a literary game, had entered into the mainstream of central European early modern political discourse.…”

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What’s in a Word? The Etymology and Historiography of Dynasty – Renaissance Europe and Beyond

Nowakowska

2020

Global Intellectual History

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The history of dynasties per se -'the timeless topoi of dynastic power' -is today intensively studied by historians. 1 Yet the history of 'dynasty' as a word or concept has not received significant attention, in spite of the word's ubiquity across many fields and its enduring resonance in wider culture. 2 This article suggests that the story of 'dynasty' the word or idea might significantly complicate our study of 'dynasty' the topic. It argues that the term 'dynasty' is in fact surprisingly etymologically unstable, both in the past and the present, rendering it a problematic term for historians. This ancient word's meaning in historical (and wider) discourse has changed fundamentally in the past 250 years, and in the process also diversified, acquiring multiple, alternative, potentially incompatible uses. The long-term change in the word's meaning exposes historians to the risk of serious anachronism, of misreading our pre-modern sources. The modern plurality of meanings, meanwhile, carries the risk that our own language as scholars is inconsistent, imprecise and unsteady, and that meaning is gradually leaking out of this familiar super-word altogether.This article will explore the problem of the word 'dynasty' in four steps: etymology, historiography, Jagiellonians, and implications. We will first trace the word's etymology from Aristotle, using both historical dictionaries and bibliographical data from seven historic libraries: its peaceable existence in the medieval and early modern periods, through the ferment of the nineteenth century, up to the present. The modern (post 1950s) historiography on dynasties in early modern Europe (c.1450-1700) will then be used as a case-study, to show how in this one field the word confusion over 'dynasty' (between historians and their sources, and amongst historians themselves) has created potential structural cracks in some of the major characterisations, or analytical models, of the period. In light of this, the key findings of a collaborative project on Europe's Jagiellonian dynasty (c.1386-1572) are here set out for the first time, as one example of how we might seek to navigate the linguistic pitfalls present in studying a major ruling lineage of the late medieval and early modern period. Finally, we consider the implications of this discussion for writing the history of times and places well beyond Renaissance Europe, not least in light of the global turn. C.S.L. Davies, in a series of celebrated articles on the Tudors, in which he discovered that sixteenth-century English monarchs did not go by that name, complained bitterly that the word 'Tudor' 'saturates modern writing on the period', 'warps our understanding', having 'acquired a spurious sense of glamour or magnificence'. 3 We might ask whether the same can be said of 'dynasty' itself, a word which Davies noted in passing was also absent in his sources but which, nonetheless, successfully managed to escaped his ire. 4 'Dynasty' has a thorny etymological history. 'Dynastia', when encountered in a sixteenth-c...

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What’s in a Word? The Etymology and Historiography of Dynasty – Renaissance Europe and Beyond

Nowakowska

2020

Global Intellectual History

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Finis Ianitii? Mikołaj Lubomirski’s supplementum to Klemens Janicki’s Vitae regum Polonorum

Ryczkowski

2022

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This contribution provides an edition of Mikołaj Lubomirski’s epigrams on Polish-Lithuanian rulers. It consists of three major parts. Firstly, a preliminary study establishes the connection between Janicki’s vitae and Lubomirski’s work. Janicki’s vitae were written around 1542 and printed as late as 1563. Many subsequent editions and Polish paraphrases introduced changes, such as the pieces on the rulers who were not covered by Janicki. A few examples of such additions (for example, two versions of Andrzej Trzecieski’s epigram) and of Janicki’s vitae editions (Gdańsk 1621, Krakow 1631, Stendal 1670) are discussed. Between 1621 and 1632, Lubomirski composed four additional (Latin) epigrams, which he included in a notebook that is partially preserved in: Krakow, Biblioteka Jagiellońska, ms. 5575 (codex unicus). The poems are collected in a separate unit (supplementum) and placed directly after the handwritten copy of Janicki’s vitae. It is argued that Lubomirski aimed to reveal the theme of Jagiellonian succession, mostly through the symmetrical composition of his cycle. Its framework is constituted by the first and the last epigram on the figures who are connected to the Jagiellonian dynasty, Sigismund II Augustus (supp. I) and Sigismund III Vasa (supp. IV). Within this arrangement, the second and the third poems are devoted to the first kings elected in the so-called free election, Henri de Valois (supp. II) and Stephen Bathory (supp. III). Both pieces contrast with each other, however: Henry’s image is clearly negative, while Stephan is depicted overall positively, and thus his profile is similar to those of Jagiellonians. Other intersections between the poems, which exceed the frame and inset composition, can be observed as well. After the critical edition of Lubomirski’s epigrams (second part) the commentary (third part) is structured not according to the chronology of the rulers, but in order to acknowledge the established theme of Jagiellonian succession. In addition to a few textual and philological issues, the commentary notes internal connections between the pieces in the supplementum. Some essential similarities and differences to other vitae cycles and texts are remarked, although the focus is on Janicki’s epigrams. Finally, the historical context is explained and the events, places, and figures that the poems refer to are identified.

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An Ambiguous Golden Age

Cited by 2 publications

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What’s in a Word? The Etymology and Historiography of Dynasty – Renaissance Europe and Beyond

What’s in a Word? The Etymology and Historiography of Dynasty – Renaissance Europe and Beyond

Finis Ianitii? Mikołaj Lubomirski’s supplementum to Klemens Janicki’s Vitae regum Polonorum

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