The story of Princess Antonomasia is one of the relatively autonomous tales interpolated into the string of adventures centered round the title character of Don Quixote. The fact that the Princess is named after the rhetorical device of antonomasia ( pronominatio), well known from ancient and early modern textbooks (Cicero, Quintilian, Erasmus, Juan Luis Vives, Cypriano de Soarez), is also one of the many signals alerting the reader to the multilevel significance of names and naming in Cervantes’ fictional world. So, in this case, Antonomasia functions as a regular proper name and, once its figurative potential is factored in, as an alias, hiding or replacing the Princess’s real name.
In Don Quixote Cervantes uses antonomasia, i.e. the trope of calling a person by a descriptive tag different from his or her given name, not only to multiply new, straightforwardly appropriate epithets, but also to open to metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, allegory, irony or paradox.

The main aim of the paper is to urge a correction in Jan Kochanowski’s translation Euripides’s Alcestis (v. 67), edited posthumously by Jan Januszowski in the volume Fragmenta albo pozostałe pisma (1590). In the Greek text (Prologue, l. 67) Apollo prophesizes that a man on the way back from wintry Thrace (Θρῄκης ἐκ τόπων δυσχειμέρων) (the reference to King Eurystheus’ horses enables us to identify him as Heracles) will snatch Alcestis from the hands of Death. In the Polish version of Apollo’s prophesy we fi nd the phrase ‘do zimnej Trąby’ (‘cold Tube’). The philological investigation undertaken in this paper has two goals to achieve. Firstly, it reconstructs the literary tradition of presenting Thrace as a land of severely cold climate (Homer, Livy, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Statius). And secondly, it takes into consideration the meaning of this poetical landscape in Kochanowski’s Latin poetry and proposes the emendation of what must have been a printer’s error.

Simone Simoni (1532–1602) was an Italian philosopher interested primarily in early modern Aristotelianism and court physician to King Stefan Batory of Poland. After the king's sudden death at Grodno on 12 December 1586, Simoni was accused of having made serious mistakes while attending his royal patient. In a bitter dispute with his rival, Niccolo Bucello, he came up witha spirited defence of his diagnosis and the adequacy of the treatment in view of the circumstances which played a crucial role in the last days of his patient. This article examines Simoni's argument concerning the king’s health, diseases and death, entitled Divi Stephani Primi Polonorum Regis Magnique Lithuanorum Ducis etc. sanitas, vita medica, aegritudo, mors (Nyssa 1587). Simoni fleshes out his polemic with a wide range of rhetorical devices, including many forms of irony and arguments ad personam. He also brings into it the larger context of interrelations between medicine and early modern philosophy, especially natural philosophy, summed up in the adage ubi desinit physicus, ibi medicus incipit (where the philosopher finishes, there the physician begins). Basically a vita medica of the king in his last days, it is also a fascinating portrait of a monarch with a passion for game hunting.

This article contains a bilingual, Latin-Polish, edition of a letter written by Erasmus to John Sixtin (Ioannes Sixtinus), a Frisian student he met in England. In it Erasmus describes a dinner party at Oxford to which he was invited as an acclaimed poet. In the presence of John Colet, leader of English humanists, table talk turned into learned conversation. Erasmus’s contribution to the debate was an improvised fable (fabula) about Cain who, in order to become farmer, persuades the angel guarding Paradise to bring him some seeds from the Garden of Eden. His speech, a showpiece of rhetorical artfulness disguising a string of lies and spurious argument, is so effective that the angel decides to steal the seeds and thus betray God’s trust. Seen in the context of contemporary surge of interest in the art of rhetoric, Erasmus’ apocryphal spoof is an eloquent demonstration of the heuristic value of mythopoeia and the irresistible power of rhetoric.