Polish Vernacular Printing Begins

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 150-151:

With the Renaissance and the increasing numbers of educated Poles came a demand for publications not only in Latin but also in the vernacular.

This was a period when the publishing industry was taking off in this part of Europe. Paper mills in Poland-Lithuania dated from the end of the fifteenth century, and the first printing press was set up in Kraków in 1474, by the Bavarian Kasper Straube. Naturally, Latin books were the first to come off the press, only later to be followed by Polish-language books. The first Polish-language book to be typeset (of course, much earlier there were manuscripts laboriously written out by hand), was the popular Paradise of Souls, which appeared in 1513. It is interesting to note that a Cyrillic-alphabet book was printed in Kraków even prior to that, in 1491, and the first Hungarian-language book was printed in the same city, in 1533. The first Polish grammar book did not come out, however, until 1568.

The sixteenth century proved the Golden Age insofar as the development of writing in the vernacular was concerned. Behind the move to turn Polish into a fully developed literary language was Mikołaj Rey (1505–1569). His famous ditty proclaimed to the world (or certainly, at least, to the Polish-speaking world): iż Polacy nie gęsi, iż swój język mają (that Poles are not geese, that they have their own language). Rey himself had not received a strong classical education, which may explain why he opted to write exclusively in Polish. Still, he penned many works, especially polemical ones, with juicy anecdote and ribald humor.

Rey helped to pave the way for the preeminent poet of the Polish Renaissance, Jan Kochanowski (1530–1584). Unlike Rey, Kochanowski was well educated and more than just conversant in Latin, yet he switched to writing in Polish sometime around 1560, while serving as secretary to King Zygmunt August. Clearly well connected, Kochanowski wrote, among other things, a play for the wedding of Chancellor Jan Zamoyski in 1577. A pure Renaissance drama, The Dismissal of the Greek Envoys boasted a message of pacifism as well as the elegant Polish for which Kochanowski was to become known. He did a magnificent job of translating the biblical Psalms, published in 1579. But Kochanowski will forever be remembered as a loving and doting father—in particular of his daughter Ursula, who died at the tender age of two. Heartbroken, Kochanowski wrote a moving series of nineteen poems lamenting her death, aptly called Laments (Polish: Treny).