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This book of collected studies on the Polish Middle Ages is unusual inmany ways. The 23 essays, reviews, and scholarly articles in it were written over a long time - half a century, and chronicle their author's path of development in research on that fascinating and wide-ranging horizon of academic interest. But what makes it even more extraordinary, and absolutely amazing in retrospect, is that the majority of these individual compositions which nevertheless make up a distinctive picture of a mediaeval Poland belonging to the cultural and spiritual fold of Western Christendom - as is only to be expected on the basis of extant documents - were actually published in People's Poland, scattered throughout a number of readily available or now rather inaccessible scholarly periodicals for Polish or Slavonic Philology. The components in the triptych devoted to the three Patron Saints of Poland (Stanislaus, Casimir, and Jadwiga) were either directly commissioned or inspired by John Paul II, their author's student colleague from their pre-war under-graduate days at the Jagiellonian University of Cracow. It is time now to fill in the cracks chipped into this true-to-life mosaic by the claws of Communist censorship, update for recent developments (all changes marked in square brackets) and present the 23 tableaux in a single vol-ume ready to hand for the curious researcher of Old Polish literature and culture, and of the fate of mediaevalist scholarship in the Poland of the latter half of the 20th century, which proved to be surprisingly fruitful despite the bleakness imposed by the ever-vigilant wardens of ideological correctness.
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