Th is paper aims to present the history of a precious manuscript from the collections of the Kórnik Library – Autograf Kościuszki. Th e manuscript, written by Tadeusz Kościuszko in mid- 1793, contains Opis kampanii r. 1792 – a description of a campaign launched against Russia. Having analysed the manuscript and discussed all the eight editions of its text, the author of the article presents its history up until the death of Józef Dobek Dzierzkowski from Lviv (1830). He subsequently discusses a brief history of Tytus Działyński’s acquaintance with Wiktor Baworowski, as contained in their mutual correspondence, which discloses the further complex fate of Autograf Kościuszki – information on its subsequent owner and the circumstances in which it found its way into the collections of the Kórnik Library. Finally, all the copies of the manuscript known from literature are discussed. In the Annex, the author publishes inter alia the abovementioned correspondence between Działyński and Baworowski.

There are two Qur’an manuscripts in the collection of the Kórnik Library (Poland) – BK 1716 and BK 2676. The first one, dating from the 17th century, is rich in different types of scribal errors and serves as an interesting example of ways of amending them. The second one, dating from the 15th century, includes interesting illuminations and calligraphy. This paper is a detailed analysis of these manuscripts, including their covers, decorations and scribal errors.

The main goal of the paper is to show the value of texts preserved in more than one version for studies aimed at identifying reasons for the demise of words. The data selected is a set of six non-surviving English preterite-present verbs. The analysis of the material shows that mediaeval manuscripts often exhibit orthographic and morphological variation as well as differ in lexemes. Such differences prove to be useful for the search of factors leading to the elimination of the verbs in question.

Notes about a handbook of Italian grammar by a Croatian philologist Dragutin Antun Parčić – A handbook of Italian grammar, written in Croatian by Croatian philologist Parčić, confirms that in the past educated Croatian-speaking people were bilingual and at the same time it proves that lower classes aimed to study Italian as well. The paper analyses the functionality and appropriateness of topics presented in the Parčić manuscript because it is obvious that the author was keen to help his Croatian-speaking students in the acquisition of Italian.

The paper presents the results of a study into lexical substitutions found in the Old English gloss to psalms 2-50 in the Eadwine Psalter. The major objectives to determine the possible sources of this manuscript, which clearly go beyond the traditional explanation that originally the gloss was derived from a Vespasian Psalter-type gloss, later revised by the corrector based on a Regius Psalter-type gloss. The analysis shows that the affiliation of the gloss is indeed highly complex for such a resource. Moreover, the paper shows that despite its numerous corrections, the Old English gloss to the Eadwine Psalter is in fact a valuable source of information on the twelfth-century scribal practice of the post-Conquest England.

The article presents the results of the discovery and text-critical analysis of the Mongolian language “golden” manuscript fragments brought to Russia and Europe from Dzungaria in the 18th century. At present 34 fragments have been detected in various depositories. The fragments belong to one set of the Mongolian Kanjur most likely dated from the first half of the 17th century. The list of the texts, to which the fragments belong, is given at the end of the article. The text-critical analysis of the fragments reveals that they contain a plethora of preclassic orthography and spelling of loanwords. Three fragments contain the text of the hitherto unknown Mongolian version of the Bhadrakalpika-sūtra, which differs from Dayičing Tayiǰi’s translation included in the bulk of the Mongolian Kanjur copies.

This paper describes a unique memoir written by a soldier about his experiences during the Russo-Japanese War 1904–1905. The memoir is written in the Krimchak ethnolect of Crimean Tatar using Hebrew letters. This memoir changes our notion about the Krimchaks as a group of quiet, religious people, indifferent to their surroundings. The memoir’s author, Menahem Berman, appears as a person who takes an active part in different historical events of his stormy life, both in peacetime in Odessa before the war and after he was called up and during his journey through Siberia to fight in the war. He describes life in field conditions during the war in Manchuria and his life after the war in captivity in Japan. He is an observant man, taking notice of all that is around him and recording all the details and his impression of them. In this paper the content of the memoir will be discussed, and the quality of the manuscript is described. In a linguistical overview, the Krimchak ethnolect used in the memoir is shown to have an Oghuz grammatical form prevailing over the Kypchak form, and hence the ethnolect can be regarded as a patois of the basic southern dialect of Crimean Tatar. This paper also presents 100 initial sentences of the text in transcription and with translation and glossary.

Starting from the famous controversy connected with the publication of Emily Dickinson’s manuscripts, this article sets out to explore how the originals were finally restored to the author’s intent. A brief analysis of the first Italian translations followed by some of the most recent attempts will prove that new translations of Dickinson’s output are still necessary.

This paper discusses Gen. Józef Bem’s activity related to the promotion and improvement of the Polish mnemonic method ( méthode mnémonique polonaise) in France. The manner of teaching chronology – and, over time, also other subjects – announced by Antoni Jaźwiński at the turn of the 1830s, was developed from 1836 by Gen. Bem and his collaborators. The evolution of the system, changes of the name of the method, as well as efforts to popularise it in education, have largely been reconstructed on the basis of materials held by the Kórnik Library. The analyses covered an interesting, mainly hand-written collection Korespondencja gen. J. Bema w sprawie metody tegoż uczenia historii [ Gen. J. Bem’s Correspondence Concerning His Method of Teaching History] and other relevant sources. The research made it possible to verify the findings of Gen. Józef Bem’s biographers concerning his activity in the period 1836–1846. Source analysis also facilitates reflection on the actual significance and impact of Bem’s didactic solutions, which as of 1841 were called méthode mnémonique franco-polonaise.

This paper seeks to acquaint the readers with problems related to Wojciech Kętrzyński’s 1893 edition of Epitaphium Dithardi abbatis [ Epitaph of abbot Dithard] in volume six of Monumenta Poloniae Historica. In contrast to the information the scholar disseminated which was subsequently commonly adopted, Epitaphium Dithardi abbatis was not a part of the hand-written collection of the so-called Oliva sources ( Fontes Olivenses). This laudatory work in a verse form, in honour of the first abbot of the Oliva monastery, was probably created in the 13th century, and today is known mainly from the 17th-century epitaph tablet surviving in the Oliva Cathedral in Gdańsk, which Wojciech Kętrzyński did not see personally. He issued Epitaphium Dithardi abbatis taking as the basis a copy of the text surviving in the Kórnik manuscript call no. BK 65, copied from this tablet in 1749. Today, in view of the existence of an older copy of the text, included in the Gdańsk manuscript (APG, call no. 940/422) copied not from the tablet but from the 15th-century polychrome, Kętrzyński’s edition should be considered insufficient.

The objective of this paper is the Arabic edition and the English translation of the Dissertation on thirst (الكلام في العطش), an anonymous text included in the miscellaneous manuscript nº 888 of the Royal Library of the Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial in Madrid (Spain). This small treatise describes what thirst is, the types of thirst that exist, the causes why hydroponics are averse to water, the reason why diabetic people are continuously thirsty, the causes why people with fever are thirsty, the reason why some foods produce thirst and others do not, and so on. The whole manuscript is composed of fourteen works, written by the same copyist along 170 folios under the general title The book of medical and philosophical curiosities and utilities (كتاب النكت والثمار الطبية والفلسفية) and their subject are curious matters that are generally out of the span of most works on these two branches of knowledge.

This article aims at understanding how scientific writing was evolving from the medieval to the Early Modern times through the study of two copies of the same text belonging to both periods: the Agnus Castus Herbal. This text offers the possibility of studying the fluidity of this specific type of discourse in a time of a profound technological innovation, reflecting the way the texts were not only produced but also perceived. For those making decisions on how to present this old material to new readers and through a new medium, the influence of the new humanist views and the powerful middle-class may have influenced the final resolutions. The Agnus Castus Herbal was a very popular tract in the Middle Ages, a fundamental part of medical treatments at the time, and was probably still of great interest in the early sixteenth century. Its Early Modern English counterpart – published in 1525 – is the first Herbal printed in England.

Th e article describes two Cyrillic Gospels from the Kórnik Library: BK 11985 and BK 896. It presents the cultural context of their creation, as well as their history, content, illuminations and a short lexical description. Both codices were the result of a cultural and spiritual revival in the Orthodox Church in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Both of them were luxury, professionally made goods; their copyists were experienced specialists. BK 896 represents a higher level of artistry. In view of their lexical characteristics, the manuscripts can be classifi ed as the third so-called Mount Athos-Tyrnovo linguistic redaction of the Gospel.

The pharmacologist of al-Andalus, born in Malaga and died in Damascus, Ibn al-Bayṭār (576/1180 or 583/1187–646/1248) composed a dozen works among which we must highlight: The Kitāb Mīzān al-Ṭabīb. The work presented here studies the only manuscript of this work that has been preserved, number 351 or Vet. 58 of the Universitetsbibliotek of Uppsala (Sweden) and describes the content of the same, a medical-pharmacological dissertation, divided into eighty chapters, each of which is dedicated to one or more diseases, going through all the organs of the body, starting with the head and ending with the feet.

The Kórnik Library is one of the oldest and most valuable establishments in Poland. By creating a library during the Partitions of Poland and collecting valuable old books and manuscripts, Tytus Działyński intended to save and foster Polish culture and traditions for posterity. Heir to Tytus – Jan Działyński – secured and expanded the Library. Having no heir himself, Jan Działyński left the Działyński inheritance to his nephew, Władysław Zamoyski, who continued his grandfather's and uncle's work. Just before his death, Władysław Zamoyski donated the entire inherited property to the Polish nation. In 1924, he established a Foundation meant to supervise the Library, a museum and the Institute of Dendrology. The Zakłady Kórnickie Foundation operated until 1953 when it was taken over by the Polish Academy of Sciences and has remained within its structure until today. The library continues assembling, developing and sharing its collections. The latest technologies have enabled us to provide the library and museum collections to the largest possible number of readers. The collections have been successively digitized and made available on the Digital Platform of the Kórnik Library created as part of the EU project POPC.02.03.01-IP.01-00-002/15 “Digital access to the resources of the Polish Academy of Sciences in the Library”.

This article examines two collections of manuscripts (previously unanalyzed) with poems which make up Leopold Staff’s debut volume The Dreams of Power. The poet offered them as a gift to Maryla Wolska who deposited them in the Michał Pawlikowski Archives at Medyka. With access to the fi rst, nearly complete, collection we can get an insight into the process of selecting poems for the version that was to go to print (1899–1901). As most of the poems are dated, we are able to establish their sequence and reconstruct the changing concept of their selection. Of special value are twelve poems which had been dropped in the process, and for most part remained unpublished. Each of them is presented briefl y in the article. Apart from making this discovery, the article demonstrates that Leopold Staff’s debut volume as we know it had an earlier version with a set of poems, different from the one that was earmarked for publication under that title.