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The writings of Marcus Antonius de Dominis were widely known throughout Europe and promptly translated into many languages. The aim of this bilingual edition (the original Latin text along with its contemporary Polish translation) of the relation he composed on his return from England is to show the role this Croatian ecclesiastical dignitary played in the history of the religious polemics going on in Poland-Lithuania in the period. The Vilnian Jesuits published the Polish version already in 1623 or 1624, very soon after the issue of the Latin original in Rome.
Another contributing reason for our decision to publish this work was that de Dominis is known to have influenced Meletiy Smotrytskiy and Zakhariy Kopystenskiy, mentors of the Eastern Orthodox Church. The impact he made in church affairs may also be observed both in the Ruthenian translation of his treatise of 1616, which was critical of the papacy, as well as in the Polish version of another of his treatises, of 1623, which in turn assumed an attitude of humility very much in favour of the Catholic point of view. De Dominis thereby built up a significant position in the debate on Church unity. We would like our edition, which has been compiled by a computer processing technique juxtaposing the two texts, to serve as a new source publication for the Uniate Christian question, which has been receiving a large amount of research interest recently. By virtue of its bilingual layout this book also offers good material for the study of 17th-century Polish translations from Latin originals. Its presentation of the language-forms used in 17th-century Polish in the parallel context of their original Latin equivalents provides an additional vista for the study of Old Polish.
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