School Poetry Devoted to Ioasaf Krokovs´kyi

The analysis of some poems devoted to Krokovs´kyi has made it possible to shed light on the ideological discourse of the Mohylanian elite at the beginning of the seventeenth century, when the Kyiv-Mohyla Collegium flourished thanks to the generous protection of Hetman Mazepa and to Metropolitan Iasyns´kyi’s clever and perspicacious policy of strengthening the Ukrainian church. Ioasaf Krokovs´kyi, the former rector of the Kyiv-Mohyla Collegium who in the analysed period occupied the most important Orthodox post in the Hetmanate, is depicted as the perfect incarnation, in his sancta eruditio and virtue, of the ideal of Sophia. The poetic portrayal of these attributes abounds in striking metaphors and associations, which are typical of Baroque taste and show Ukraine’s full-fledged assimilation of and participation in contemporary European culture. In celebrating Krokovs´kyi as a worthy successor of Metropolitan Iasyns´kyi and an exemplary model of Holy Wisdom, the Mohylanian poets and budding versifiers availed themselves masterfully of the lexical and rhetorical arsenal of contemporary Europe’s cultural language. Their work aimed to add another element to the project of portraying the key institutions of Ukrainian Orthodoxy and their representatives as an abode of wisdom. The fact that biblical parallels (although not biblical metaphors and metaphorical language) are almost absent in this celebration should not surprise; it rather attests to the aspiration to participate in contemporary European Latinitas, which had its roots in Humanism and the Renaissance.