What brings the community together liberal : arts and thinking about community in Polish renaissance literature

The article is an effort to identify specific way of thinking about the human communality present in Polish Renaissance literature. It refers to selected texts, representative for their employment of the idea of ars - societatis vinculum, i.e. liberal arts, as the most important communal binder. The preliminary aim of the analyses is to demonstrate that the idea was used in works diverse in terms of genre and functionality. Therefore, they include not only the texts, which seem to be self-apparent in the context, but also the humanistic treatises focusing directly on the praise of liberal arts and the affirmation of their social meaning (e.g. the texts of Andreas Patricius Nidecius, Ioannes Arundinensis, Andronicus Tranquillus) and other humanistic literary works concerning the role of arts (e.g. of Jan Kochanowski, Łukasz Górnicki). Intentionally, these texts are confronted with others whose presence in such a context is more striking, like the lexicographical work of Jan Mączyński or explicitly political writings of the interregnum period. Important Classical sources were identified, which makes it possible to reconstruct the presuppositions of the idea and the literary topoi associated with it. These are, first of all, the works of Cicero, including the fragments of the dialogue De re publica, considered to be yet undiscovered in the 16th century. Here, the role of Augustinian texts was highlighted as the intermediary in the acquisition and creative elaboration of the idea on Polish soil. The author sets her analyses in a triple research context. First, she refers to the two idioms of the interrelation between "the social" and "the cultural", still influencing Polish research e.g. in the 19th century Cracow Historical School (S. Tarnowski) and post-war Marxist theory. Then, she confronts her argumentation with the currently invigorated studies on early modern ideas of community (e.g. the works of E. Muir, P. Burke, A. Shepard, P. Withington, K.E. Spierling). The author argues that the interpretations situating the idea of ars as societatis vinculum in a narrow sociological perspective or reducing it to a purely conventional set of literary topoi are not satisfactory in being reductive. According to her interpretation, the idea covers the integral and coherent vision of human community and its authentic cultural frames. She concludes that it is the critical analysis of social terms, always informed by the deep revision of the cultural modes of their expression that distinguished the communal thinking of Polish Renaissance literature and decides its specific definition of human togetherness. In a broader sense, the text contributes to the current debate on the social role of humanities, as an effort to reconstruct an early modern paradigm of thinking about the relation between culture and society, still present in Polish humanistic thinking