The Philosophical Reading of Master Vincentius

Abstract

Educated most probably in Paris, Wincenty, or Master Vincentius, called Kadłubek (d. 1223), was a lawyer, advisor to Duke Casimir II the Just (Kazimierz Sprawiedliwy) and, subsequently, bishop of Cracow. His chronicle, compiled on Casimir’s commission before 1207–8, is a decent representative of the twelfth-century renaissance. Firstly, we established the algorithm for the numerical comparison of the Chronicle and his supposed source; secondly, we took into account some of the writings of the Greek and Roman philosophers taught in the schools of 12th century and known by writers of the same period. The essay seeks to identify crypto-quotes in Wincenty’s chronicle, where a considerable number of unlabeled opinions by other authors – philosophers, poets, and so on – are potentially traceable. We furthermore aimed at reconstructing the list of books used by the chronicler as a source or reference material. We have assumed, as a principle, that a single citation from one work would not legitimize the statement that the chronicler knew directly that source. With two or three quotations from one work, we seek to establish the reasons why these quotations are in the Chronicle. The results obtained have significantly enlarged the number of (hitherto-known) quotes from Plato’s Timaeus (in Calcidius’s translation), Rhetorica ad Herennium, Seneca’s Moral Letters, and Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae. In this context, we have taken into account, for the first time, the logical texts by Aristotle and Boethius, discovering in Vincentius’s chronicle traces of the reading of the Topics and On Sophistical Refutations (by the former author) and of De topicis differentiis (by the latter). After a thorough comparison with all the works of Cicero and a critical analysis of the quotations accepted by our predecessors, we retained only one source: the De senectute. We have also excluded the possible evidence of Kadłubek’s knowledge of Macrobius. Our contribution is of philological nature as it seeks to determine the relation and dependencies between Historia Polonica and its philosophical sources. We discuss the nature of these relationships and their philosophical character in other studies. The present essay forms, we believe, a convenient point of departure for further research on philosophical aspects of Wincenty’s output and on the reception of philosophy in Poland in the late twelfth and early thirteenth century.