Staropolskie chorografie : początki - rozwój - przemiany gatunku

Abstract

The book is an attempt to fill a certain gap in literary historical studies, in which the topic of Old Polish chorographies did not figure prominently at all. Chorography is a systematic description of an area, such as a country, a region, or a place, and that genre was codified in the Alexandrian period by Claudius Ptolemaeus. The book contains a sketch of the history of the genre in Polish literature, beginning with the Middle Ages and ending with the 17th c. as well as a presentation of the European traditions of chorography and of some semantic questions connected with the meaning and evolution of the term itself. The wide time range and the interdisciplinary approach allowed the author to show the evolution that chorographies underwent in the Old Polish times. Various kinds of chorographies were distinguished, such as topography, hydrography, and a mixed generic structure. An attempt was also made to place the discussed genre in a system of geographical and travel writing of the early Poland. A chronological arrangement of the discussed material and the analysis that was carried out made it possible to show the development of the generic varieties of Old Polish chorographies - beginning with a description of Polish lands in the Polish Chronicle by Gallus, which was short and unoriginal, through the work by Jan Długosz Chorographia Regni Poloniae, and ending with a broadened variety of the genre, represented, inter alia, by the treatises by Mathias of Miechow, Marcin Kromer, and Szymon Starowolski. Chorographies contributed to a considerable development of the forms of spatial description, they were using descriptive and narrative elements, and various aspects of their contents and composition became a part of the geographical and travel literature, whose popularity continues until this day.