Studia Filologiczne UJK

Summary

This paper concerns the intentionality of text and the circumstances of language usage. In more detail the article relates to methods of talking about the past in the sixteenth-century chronicles. This type of text can be treated as a tool for social communication which has a double role: firstly, it records the selected topics of glorious tradition in social and individual memory, secondly, it shapes the attitudes and awareness which are contemporary for the piece of writing and which result in the future. Historiographers not only wanted to get to know the past facts but also to show them in the appropriate way. The basic mechanism that was used to do it was painting a picture of glamor past through various linguistic means of idealization and mythologization of the past. This action was aimed to shape the great future of the state as well as sensible and responsible society. Historiography merged social imagination, created a collective memory, and as a result has built community. Common fortunes, common history are the basic of the nation formation and that is why intentional commemoration as a chronicle formed the foundations of national identity (at that time only the noble one).