85 INTRODUCTION Prodromus Reginae Artium, that is, Messenger of the Queen of Arts or Training Beginners of Eloquence (PRA) is a textbook on rhetoric composed by St. Stanislaus Papczyński in Latin and which sustained four reprints in less than a seven-year period. It was first released in print in Warsaw in 1663, by the printing house of the royal printer Elert, which also produced two subsequent editions in 1664 and 1665. The third edition, which has not survived to this day, appeared under an altered title: Prodromus Rhetoricus sive Institutiones Rhetoricae. The book’s fourth issue, printed under the original title, took place in Krakow in 1669. The title of the work, for which the author used a word of Greek origin: prodromus (from the verb prodromeuein, i.e., “to serve in the reconnaissance on horseback”; the Greek singular pródromos may be construed as the Latin equivalent of praecursor or “predecessor, messenger,” that is, someone who announces something different), indicates that Father Papczyński had in mind the work on rhetoric he composed in six books entitled the Queen of the Arts (Regina artium). The PRA was supposed to be the herald of this very work. We know that Fr. Papczyński — as he was teaching rhetoric in Piarist colleges — developed, for didactic purposes as early as 1658, a comprehensive textbook on rhetoric under this very title, and included some parts of it in the PRA. Basically, Prodromus reginae artium is an abbreviated edition of Regina artium, as Papczyński himself indicated in the PRA; however, it cannot be verified today, because Regina artium was never released in print because the manuscript was lost. Nonetheless, the fact that it existed once is confirmed by the documentation submitted for Fr. Papczyński’s beatification process, from which we learn that in 1773, two volumes of Regina artium were submitted to Rome.
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