"Carmen de statura, feritate ac venatione bisontis" Mikołaja Hussowskiego — poemat epicki?

Abstract

Carmen de statura, feritate ac venatione bisontis of Nicolaus Hussovianus – the epic poem?

The article presents the problem of poetic genre’s definition of Nicolaus Hussovianus’s Carmen de statura, feritate ac venatione bisontis. The poem was written in Rome by the order of Erazm Ciołek, bishop of Plock, during his diplomatic mission in Vatican in response to an interest expressed by Pope Leo X in the bison of the Polish-Lithuanian forests. The difficulty is that this work was written on elegiac distich and, according to classical Greek and Roman tradition, the measure was strictly connected with poetic genre, therefore has to be counted among elegy, but almost all investigators classify Carmen de bisonte as an example of epic didactic poetry. The 1072-line poem contains both epic and lyric elements. The author in this paper proposes an analysis of this work based on the tradition of poetic genres accepted in the period of Renaissance, and presents a new interpretation, which considers political situation of that time.