Key-words: the historical linguistics, the lexical variant, the synonymy, fifteenth-century’ Polish translations of the Roman Canon of the Mass.
The book discusses the phenomenon of lexical variants in the Old Polish language till the year 1500., on the material of seventeen independent Polish translations of the Roman Canon of the Mass, which are dated to the 15th century (this is the complete material from extant manuscripts, and it includes a few whole translations, but mostly fragments and single glosses). The author has focused on eleven particular examples from the Latin Canon to show how given words were transmitted from one language to another; the words and phrases chosen for the analysis are as follows: placatus, disponas, orthodoxis, praeclarum, adunare, Ecclesia, toto orbe terrarum, aestimator meriti, sacrificia illibata, fides cognita and memoriam venerantes. Closer inspection of the above words in translation (or, in different translations) betrays some stylistic manners of the medieval scribes, and allows the author to discover some mechanisms of translating the Canon. Also, it helps to understand numerous scribal mistakes as introduced by medieval copyists.
The second part of the book contains a critical edition of all the preserved fragments and glosses from the Old Polish translations of the Latin Canon. The texts have been represented in the transliteration and in modern transcription, and supplemented by facsimiles, with a belief that the tabular layout is a convenient way to follow textual differences and similarities across seventeen versions of the Canon.