Despite increased interest in non-classical Latin, even today little information about Neo-Latin literature from Eastern Central and Eastern Europe reaches the international scientific community. This concerns also Nicolaus Hussovianus' "Poem on Bison" (publ. 1523) which is claimed by several 'heirs' of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth simultaneously as part of their national literature and has become a key text of the Belarusian Renaissance. In addition to the overview of editions and research literature in Polish, Belarusian, Russian and others, the article embarks upon a traditional search for influences-and-references from an alternative methodological stance. Instead of just localizing (more or less plausible) quotes and allusions, it asks for the meaning and function which the references acquire in the new surroundings. Intertextual links to Virgil's "Georgica" and "Bucolica", which propagate the ideal of returning to a primordial way of life in a rural idyll, as well as Tacitus' "Germania", with its image of the 'alien' Germans implying the deficiencies of contemporary Romans, contribute important semantic layers to Hussovianus' text. The intertextual links embody a reformist desire, which is closely related to the text's pragmatic intentions. "Carmen de bisonte" is actually much more than just an "original and authentic" description of Belarusian (or Polish, or Lithuanian) beasts, woods and customs. Refs 57.

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Summary The full-time jurist and gifted Neo-Latin poet Petrus Royzius, born in Spain, came to Cracow in 1541/1542 to teach Roman law at the university. He left for Vilnius in 1551 and died in the Lithuanian capital in 1571. Several scholars have collected observations about Lithuania and the Lithuanians that are scattered over Royzius’s more than one thousand verse texts. This article goes further in closely analysing and interpreting well-known texts, such as the macaronic poem about travelling through the Lithuanian province (In Lituanicam peregrinationem). It also adds new material that has not yet been considered from this point of view, such as Royzius’s poems in favour of the Union of Lublin in 1569. I further analyse the contextual meaning of the terms Sarmatia/n and Lithuania/n. Although the latter is often replaced or subsumed by the superordinate terms Sarmatia/n or Poland/Polish, it occurs frequently in the corpus of Royzius’s writing. However, Royzius’s texts feature little information about a specific Lithuanian historical or cultural identity. Likewise, there is hardly any information about smaller entities such as Samogitia or Russia (Ruthenia). Unlike his contemporary Augustinus Rotundus or later poets like Ioannes Radvanus, Royzius still belongs to a ‘pre-Lublin’ cultural paradigm in which literary representations of regional, non-Polish identity were of little significance.

Booth, Frederick J. (ed., transl.). Song of the Bison. Text and Translation of Nicolaus Hussovianus's "Carmen de statura, feritate ac venatione bisontis". Leeds-Amsterdam: Arc Humanities Press; Amsterdam University Press, 2019, 87 p. * I thank Elsbeth van der Wilt for proof-reading and my colleagues at Giessen for help with the Polish and Belarusian abstracts.1IJsewijn's ground-breaking companion represents this scope (IJsewijn, 1977; 2 nd ed., 2 vols., 1990-1998. Recent examples are Martin Korenjak's history of Neo-Latin literature (Korenjak, 2016) and his anthology (Korenjak, 2019; 672 lines from CdB: p. 342-349).

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