Jansenist Education and Racine’s Intertextuality in European Context: Can an Early Modern Translation of Andromaque Help Revisit an Old Concept?

Abstract The article deals with the intertextual dimensions of Jean Racine’s tragedy Andromaque and its rendering by the seventeenth–century Polish translator Stanisław Morsztyn. The analysis is based on an old hypothesis concerning the link between Racine’s intertextual literary practice and his erudite education at the Petites écoles de Port-Royal. The translator, although he had not received Jansenist education, was able to identify correctly and develop the original strategy of quotations and allusions. The article attempts to seek the factors that helped the Polish translator render the intertextuality of Andromaque in another cultural context. Three such factors have been proposed—the tradition of neo-Latin poetry developed both in France and in Poland, the Italian Petrarchism (along with the idea of sprezzatura ), perceived not as a store of topics but as a pattern of free operation with Ancient allusions. The similarity between Racine’s education and that of Morsztyn, which combined the influence of the Polish Brethren with homeschooling, could have been the third factor. The article closes with a question concerning the perspectives of cultural studies in intertextual strategies of poets connected with various religious circles of the seventeenth century.