The article looks at how the mannerist tradition has influenced a seventeenth century long poem Poema de vanitate mundi by German Jesuit poet Jacob Balde (1604–1668). The paper starts with a general introduction about the author and the poem itself. De vanitate mundi has been described as a part of the mannerist tendencies occurring in different times and places (like the importance of conceit in formulating artistic texts or the role of formal means including extensive enumeratio and experimental cutting out of the syllables), as well as shows these features of it which can be directly connected to emblematic tradition of the early modern period. It focuses on three aspects of this tradition. Firstly – the unconventional role of the image in De vanitate mundi with particular emphasis on its connection to the surrounding printed text; secondly – the variety of paraphrases which form a complex, multi-genre structure of the poem; finally – the influence elogium (a phenomenon directly connected to emblem) must have had on Baldes work. The emblematic tradition has been described as a composite of different tendencies rather than a normative and stable entity. The article aims at tracing this variety of tendencies in Balde poem. Particularly, the Jesuit (or modelled according to Jesuit habits) meditative emblem cycles are presented here as a source of the structure of De vanitate mundi. Also, the article emphasizes how the Jesuit culture influenced the shape and form of De vanitate mundi (e.g. the role of dramatic elements within the paraphrases, the meditative character of the poem or its didactic values).
Two early modern Polish translations of “Poema de vanitate mundi” by Jakob Balde edited by Maria Kozłowska is an important publication from the perspective of research into Baroque religious poetry, especially the Saxon times. The popularity of Balde’s poem in late Baroque can be seen not only in its subsequent editions, but also in the references to it in the works of the contemporary religious poets, including Dominik Rudnicki and Karol Mikołaj Juniewicz. In the introduction to this edition the author presents Balde as a Jesuit poet, who subordinates his writing to didactic and moralistic objectives, but at the same time strives to engage the reader’s senses, following the principles of Ignatian meditation.
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