Hitherto unknown life of St Casimir and its Vilnius translator – Jan Kochanowski’s lithuanian following comes forth

The article presents the earliest Polish Life of St Casimir the Prince, printed in Vilnius in 1606. The only known copy of the print was recently discovered in the National Ukrainian Library in Lviv. The author of the article discusses the content of the print, and analyzes its components. As a matter of fact, the print contains not only the saint’s vita (translated from Latin), but also other works, like soldiers’ prayers, St Casimir’s breviary hymns (by Zaccaria Ferreri, 1521) and the twelfth-century anthem Omni die dic Mariae, attributed to Casimir. The article presents a profi le of the translator, Mateusz Chrysostom Wołodkiewicz, graduate of the University of Vilnius and author of other works, most notably In Praise of Hetman Jan Karol Chodkiewicz’s Victory over the Swedes at Kircholm (1525). The case of Wołodkiewicz and his work illustrates a new phase in the expansion of Polish culture (reinvented and given new confi dence by Jan Kochanowski) in Lithuania in the 16th and 17th century