In search of origins: Bogurodzica

In literary historiography, beginnings tend to be relative. The starting point of any historical narrative is often decided not by whether a given artifact was in fact “first” in its cultural or linguistic realm, but rather by various external circumstances. The attempt to unequivocally determine whether Bogurodzica was the first Polish poem appears to be a much more complicated undertaking than in the Italian case. The critical literature that has accumulated around Bogurodzica over at least two centuries is enormous, and proposals for its dating span roughly four centuries, from the tenth to the fourteenth centuries. Yet regardless of any specialist arguments about the hymn’s cultural background, it seems that Bogurodzica’s centuries-long accumulation of identity-related themes created a situation whereby discussions about it have never been exclusively focused on historical-literary matters. Instead, they have also taken on the character of a debate about the possible forms of Polish identity.