Collected Works of Meletij Smotryc'kyj

Book excerpt: Meletij Smotryc ́kyj (ca. 1577-1633), a man of great learning and wide cultural horizons, was one of the outstanding figures of the cultural revival in the Ukrainian and Belorussian lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. First as a staunch advocate of Orthodoxy and then after 1627 as an equally ardent defender of the Uniates, Smotryc ́kyj wrote numerous polemical, homiletic, philological, and theological works that well illustrate the complexity of the intense confessional and cultural competition between Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox. This volume reproduces in facsimile the original printed editions of eleven of his most important religious writings, beginning with the famous Threnos (1610) and concluding with Exaethesis (1629). The Introduction surveys the controversial details of Smotryc ́kyj's biography and critically analyzes the corpus of works attributed to him.