Feliks Bętkowski on the Polish "Golden Age"

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The main aim of the paper is to present and reconstruct the way Bentkowski showed 16th-century literature in his book, The History of Polish Literature (1814). There was significant awareness of the high rank of the Renaissance in the Polish Enlightenment. The book by Bentkowski also commanded much attention and was praised as the most complete bibliography at the beginning of the 19th century, which made meticulous use of the research done by his predecessors on that subject. The book is often said to be actually the first Polish history of literature. In it, attention was focused on how Bentkowski, the representative of the late Enlightenment, perceived and evaluated the most important phenomena of 16th-century Polish culture, which in his opinion, was the epoch of its own (one out of five). The analysis here is based on adequate fragments of the oeuvre, which are situated in different parts of the book and in different contexts. The first part of the article presents: the origin, character, layout and contents of both of the two volumes of the book, as well as each part of each one of them. Then, Bentkowski’s method of classifying the material is presented. The author argues that to Bentkowski, the term ‘literature’ meant the whole literary heritage, though he places poetry, divided into genres, in the centre of his interest. He characterises the 16th century as the golden age of Polish culture. It is emphasised in the article that Bentkowski presented favourable conditions for the development of science and culture, which were created by three of the 16th-century rulers: Zygmunt I, Zygmunt August and Stefan Batory. He also emphasised the role of the patronage, the educational system, printing houses and religious tolerance. What is more, he pointed out the development of secret practices, such as alchemy and astrology, as negative phenomena. The article goes on to describe Bentkowski’s observations on the most outstanding 16th-century authors, such as Jan Kochanowski (most highly rated by him), Mikołaj Rej, Szymon Szymonowic and Łukasz Górnicki. In the book, the literature of that period is presented through the portrayal of particular authors, characteristics of genres and literary works representing them. In some cases short fragments of the aforementioned works are provided. The second volume of the book draws attention to the achievements of authors representing fields of knowledge other than fine literature, such as Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski, Wojciech z Brudzewa, Mikołaj Kopernik and Marcin Bielski. The author of the article emphasises the Enlightenment-like point of view in presenting the epoch in question, and he accentuates the relevance of some aspects of the 16th-century works. He emphasizes the significance of Bentkowski’s work for its way of portraying the Renaissance in subsequent studies in literary history.