Sickness and Death of the Body Politic in Early Modern Poland: Republic’s Lamentation in Literature and Political Discourse

Abstract

The political and moral crisis experienced by the noble estate of the Crown of Poland in the sixteenth and seventeenth century found its sincerest expression in the laments of the Republic. Beginning from the 1522 Epitaphium Reipublicae by Andrzej Krzycki, this literary tradition drew on classical, particularly Ciceronian imagery of a sick and dying body politic. Over the next decades, this imagery became intertwined with political discourse, as evidenced by parliamentary speeches from 1562–64. In the same period, Jan Dymitr Solikowski penned Facies Rei Publicae, an immensely popular narrative of the healing of the body politic, and created figurative representations of Sick and Sane Republic; while Stanisław Samuel Szemiot, writing over a century later, craftily adapted Hippocratean concepts in a poetical necropsy of the body politic. Most importantly, the aforementioned authors all shared a genuine belief that their political community was in decay, and their own life imperiled. A careful reading of the textual pathologies they created allows for a diagnosis of historico-philosophical roots of their anxiety.