Editorial assumptions and philological terminology of Jan Kochanowski’s Congress for Historical and Literary Studies

Abstract

Jan Kochanowski’s Congress for Historical and Literary Studies, held in Kraków on 28–30 May 1884, was of great importance for the development of Polish scholarly edition. The papers presented at that time and the accompanying discussions presented important publishing initiatives and proposed models of editing, which exceeded the standards of most editions of literary works at that time. Roman Pilat’s convention speech is regarded as the founding speech for Polish scholarly editing; voices of classical philologists, literary critics and historians were also important, stressing the importance of editions adequate to the needs of science at that time. The debates at the congress revealed great divergences in positions on the basic issues of textual criticism: the information equipment of a critical edition and the modernization of a text. These divergences resulted from different philological traditions (classical, French, Germanic) and were determined by the political situation of scientific research: difficult cooperation between university centers and scientific societies. The Congress was an attempt to overcome these difficulties.