The Polish Translation of the Historia Trium Regum, from a Textual Criticism Perspective
Published 2026-07-02
Keywords
- Historia Trium Regum,
- Historia Trzech Króli,
- Johannes de Hildesheim,
- Laurentius a Lasco,
- Textual Criticism
Copyright (c) 2026 Marcello Piacentini
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Abstract
The anonymous Polish translation of Johannes of Hildesheim’s Historia Trium Regum, as handed down in a copy dated 1544, has received substantial attention. Scholars, mainly Polish, have focused their attention on the phonetic and orthographic peculiarities of the transmitting manuscript, and more generally on the place of the translation in the literary culture of Poland as the Middle Ages arrived at their delayed ending. However, there has been little concerted effort at comparing the translation with the Latin text, above all accounting for the possibilities of alteration in the handwritten transmission of the Latin, although it has been noted that without this ‘original’ text it can be difficult to understand the meaning of the Polish. Not only, we would add, but without the Latin it remains difficult to objectively evaluate the work of the translator, or of the copyist. The aim of this contribution is to identify some errors in the translation which derive from the redactions of the Latin text; in this same analytical path, using the basic tools of neo-Lachmannian criticism, to identify the branch of transmission of the Latin text from which the Polish translation was probably derived.
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