Urbs admiranda, czyli śląski podziw dla miasta

Abstract

The theme of the city has always played an important role in Silesia, one of the most urbanized areas in Central Europe. It occupied a significant position, if not the central one, in the Silesian New Latin literature. The city was not only a background, a board for the literary game, but also the main theme, the addressee of praise songs. Anne, the wife of the famous humanist, Laurentius Corvinus, is inextricably bound with one of the first poems that extoll the city. Some of the most eulogized cities are Wroclaw (Vratislavia, Bresla) and Złotoryja (Goldberga). Silesian cities were glorified both in poetry and prose until the end of the 18th century which is the end of the Latin literary culture in Silesia. Vernacular literature that followed depicted the city in a pejorative way, as a paved desert full of horror and fear, referring to the commonplace disapproving perception of the city in the biblical tradition.