The Letters of Bernardo Morando to Jan Zamoyski (1592–1594). A Philological Translation with Commentary

Abstract

The present article is dedicated to the analysis of the correspondence of Bernardo Morando, the Venetian architect and builder of Zamość, preserved in the Zamoyski Archives and addressed to Jan Zamoyski between 1592 and 1594. Although these letters have long been known to scholars and mentioned in the relevant literature, they have not yet been fully translated into Polish. Their character is strictly practical and informational rather than artistic; nevertheless, they constitute an important factual source for researchers of the history of Renaissance Poland and a valuable linguistic material documenting the contemporary state of the vernacular variety of Italian from the former Venetian region as preserved in manuscript collections in Poland. The authors outline the historical context in which the correspondence was produced, discuss its substantive content, and conduct a philological analysis of the Italian original text from a diachronic perspective, employing an appropriate linguistic research methodology (qualitative assessment of linguistic data, description of phonological, morphological, syntactic, and orthographic phenomena) while taking into account the regional features of Morando’s language. The publication includes a complete translation of the letters into Polish, the content of which has been transcribed on the basis of manuscript scans obtained from microfilms held in the Central Archives of Historical Records (Archiwum Główne Akt Dawnych – AGAD).