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SHORT NOTES

The texts analyzed by the author were created for school theatres active in schools run by Jesuit, Piarist, Basilian and Theatine monks, for the Protestant secondary schools in Royal Prussia and Greater Poland and for the Cracow Academy.

In nine chapters the author characterizes the interludes performed at individual schools, compares them with the entr’actes created in popular and royal court milieus, analyzes the structure and elements of their plots and depicts their comic aspects. The study shows that the entr’actes existed in theatre schools as a separate genre of drama. (MP)

Danuta Kunstler-Langner, Anioł w poezji baroku. Dzieje postaci w kulturze dawnej Europy [The Angel in Baroąue Poetry: Its History in the Culture of Old Europę], Toruń 2007, Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika, 233 pp., ills., sum. in English, French, German

Danuta Kunstler-Langner’s book deals with the figurę of the angel in Baroąue poetry, but the author’s refiections also refer to visua! arts and are preceded by a preface discussing medieval ideas about angels. The author examines angelological themes in the works of most important Baroąue poets: Mikołaj Sęp-Szarzyński, Sebastian Grabowiecki, Kacper Twardowski, Zbigniew Morsztyn and Stanisław Herakliusz Lubomirski. She compares their ideas about angels with the ideas of the best European creators: George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw, Jean de la Cepped, Jean-Baptiste Chassignet and with the mystical works of Angelus Silesius.

Old Polish authors attributed functions to angels which were known already in the Middle Ages. They regarded them as protectors, interpreters of the world, guides to God’s housc, commentators of individual fates, defenders against the forces of darkness and death witnesses. In poetry the figurę of an angel appeared most freąuently in a religious context, as an emanation of God and a sign of God’s presence.

The study is an attempt to interpret well known poems from another point of view. It does not present new theories, nor does it put new ideas into scientific circulation. (MP)

Radosław Skrycki, Dzieje kartografii Nowej Marchii do końca XVIII wieku [The History of the Cartography of the New March up to the End of the 18th Century], Warszawa 2008, DiG, 152 pp., bibl., index of persons, 22 ills.

Radosław Skrycki’s study is the first attempt in Polish historiography to describe the development of cartography in the New Mark; it is also an important supple-ment to Karol Buczek’s synthesizing works. It deserves all the morę attention as the part of Brandenburg beyond the Oder has rarely been researched by Polish historians during the last fifty years.