Harriet said…, a lesser known, 1972 novel by an acclaimed writer Beryl Bainbridge (1932–2010), is a work about friendship. However, only apparently – as the events in the story unfold, the reader slowly realizes how toxic and corrupting the bond between the eponymous Harriet and her nameless friend (the narrator) is. Bainbridge, inspired by real-life tragedy, presents a haunting vision of friendship marred by violence, both emotional and physical. Two adolescent girls devise a specific life ideology and as they explore the limits of their self-understanding, they transgress social norms, which ultimately leads them to a completely gratuitous crime. Hence, an important questions arises – is it still a friendship or, rather, a form of mutual exploitation? What makes their relationship Gothic? The aim of my analysis will be to respond to these queries.

The paper deals with the problem of defi nite article in the Gothic Bible. More specifically, it concentrates on the differences and similarities of use between the target language, i.e. Gothic, and the source language, i.e. Greek, with special attention being paid to the case of the article – nominative, genitive, dative or accusative. It is part of a larger endeavor aiming at the analysis of the whole Gothic Bible in this respect. This time the Gospel of John is taken into consideration, following an earlier study which concentrated on the Gospel of Matthew. In the paper it will not only be observed how frequently Gothic omits the definite article in places where Greek uses it in the Gospel of John, but also in what way the cases of the definite article vary in both languages due to their grammatical specificities.

The paper compares the employment of the definite article in the Gothic version of the Gospel of Luke and in its Greek counterpart which served as the basis for the Gothic translation. Although the Gothic text is usually said to be a word-for-word reflection of the Greek text, we demonstrate that just like in the case of the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of John, which were of concern in our previous studies, there are enormous differences between the two languages especially in the domain of the definite article, not only in terms of amount but also in terms of the cases used – nominative, genitive, dative or accusative.

The horror fiction of the Romantic Age differs considerably from its contemporary descendants. While generally associated with scary entertainment (‘playing with fear’), the Romantic Gothic often enough crossed the line to explore the depths of genuine epistemological, existential or political fears. This would not have been possible without developing its own poetics which drew its strength from a variety of sources. One of them was the speculative philosophy of history in its pessimistic and optimistic variants. They both fed the sense of horror and its literary transpositions. Moreover, they formed a positive feedback loop: anxiety over the course of history led to the use of the devices and registers of the poetics of horror, which in turn led to the amplification of the effects of the historical vision on the reader.

Jan Walter of Chojnice (*about 1445, †1512), initially a vicar, and then a parson of St. Peter and Paul’s Church, as well as a secretary of Gdansk City Council, is one of the best known figures associated with the old book culture in Gdansk. The article describes one of the aspects of his bibliophilia: book covers marked with supralibros. It first discusses works by local bookbinders made for Walter, and then analyses a supralibros in the form of a miniature oval featuring the mark of a bibliophile (the head of a Negro) against the background of the European and local tradition of marking books in late Middle Ages. As a result, it is demonstrated that six from among the Gdansk citizen’s books we currently know, which contain the mark, were provided with it secondarily. This is mainly indicated by the non-typical locations of the supralibros – each one is in a way “squeezed in” between the regularly spaced elements of the blind embossing adornment of the covers.

This paper presents two rare 16th-century panel-stamped bindings from the collections of the Kórnik Library. The first one, decorated with an impression of a panel depicting the personification of the Christian virtue of Hope (Spes), protects the printed book published in 1545. The binding was made by a Netherlandish bookbinder working in Leuven, called Master IP, identified with Jacob Pandelaert (d. ab. 1563). The second binding presents a Gothic motif of animals-in-foliage and protects a printed book published in 1550. The authorship of the panel (the so-called de profundis) is attributed to a bookbinder working in the town of ’s-Hertogenbosch (fr. Bois-le-Duc), Geraert van der Hatart (d. ab. 1540/1541). Both these bindings testify to the fact that the holdings of the Kórnik Library include gems of the West-European bookbinding craft.