„Kolacyja przyjacielska” Jakuba Niemojewskiego z jezuitami poznańskimi – glosa terminologiczna

Abstract

Ultimately unsuccessful attempts to organize a public dispute with the Jesuits from Poznań in 1574–1575 forced Jakub Niemojewski (d. 1586), a vigorous reformer and talented orator, to write and publish “diatribe or friendly discussion” (“diatribe albo kolacyja przyjacielska”) in 1577. Due to a Jesuit intervention, to whom the first pages of the printed text were given, the publication was immediately suspended. They had the printer’s workshop destroyed, he was sentenced to whipping in the pillory, and the books were finally burnt. Despite the fact that only over a dozen pages of the text have survived, it may be interesting for historians of rhetoric for at least two reasons. Firstly, it is associated with the beginnings of anti-Jesuit literature in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, written to confine increasing influences of this expansive religious order. Secondly, it may be treated as an intriguing case of debate on the art of debate or negotiating the initial conditions for public dispute, which reveal significant differences in the understanding of its nature, form, and purpose. Taking into account this meta-rhetorical dimension of Niemojewski’s polemic, the paper aims at specifying the meaning of the title term “discussion” (“kolacyja”) as a semantic equivalent of “diatribe” in three interrelated contexts: art of argumentation (collatio argumentorum), Erasmian model of polemic on theological questions (collatio Erasmiana), and a topos of “friendly” discourse (collatio amica).