Dudithiana novissima (cum minutia Bezana): Two overlooked letters by Andreas Dudith and unrecorded entries from the liber amicorum of Jan and Adam Čejka

Abstract

This article introduces two hitherto overlooked letters by the heterodox humanist Andreas Dudith (1533–1589). These letters, addressed to Joachim Meister of Görlitz and Lorenz Scholtz of Freystadt, not only shed additional light on the corpus of letters to and from Dudith that have come down to us, but also provide new information about the complex relations between members of the Silesian intellectual elite and show that apart from the people already identified by the editors of Epistulae, which are also confirmed by the two documents edited here, some new names should be taken into consideration. The article also provides a critical edition of Dudith’s note on Girolamo Savonarola inspired by the latter’s effigy in Theodore Beza’s Icones of 1580. The newly identified Prague copy of this inscription, unlike the two copies preserved in Berlin and Wrocław, allows one to tie this text with the now lost album amicorum of Czech noblemen, Jan and Adam Čejka of Olbramovice. The Prague copy also brings a hitherto unrecorded epigram dedicated by Beza to the Čejka, an edition of which is also included in this paper.