Jan Mączyński

Jan Mączyński (c. 1520 – c. 1587) was a Polish humanist and lexicographer.

Academic career

In 1540 Jan Mączyński became a student at the court of the bishop of Poznań, Sebastian Branicki, who also later funded Mączyński's travels and studies abroad. In 1543 he went to Wittenberg to study under Philip Melanchthon and later to Strasbourg where he was a student of Petrus Dasypodius a professor of Greek. In 1550 he was in Wittenberg as a friend of Lelio Sozzini. In 1551 he returned to Poland with a knowledge of Latin, Greek, and German and some knowledge of French, Italian and Hebrew. and became one of the Polish brethren (in Poland referred to as "Arians") though he did not support the movement's more radical social program. He represented Sieradz at the sejm in Lublin and the 1560 Sejm in Warsaw where, together with Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski, Mączyński argued for ecumenism and religious tolerance.

Academic work During his studies at Zurich Mączyński began work on a Polish-Latin Dictionary. In 1564 he moved to Königsberg (Królewiec) where he published his dictionary, which was later edited by Jan Sandecki-Malecki. The dictionary "Lexicon Latino Polonicum Ex optimis Latinae Linguae Scriptoribus Concinnatum” ran 1000 pages and contained 20,500 Latin terms, including idioms and jargon, and their Polish equivalents. In Poland the dictionary was considered an important contribution to classical studies and was referred to as the Mączyński Dictionary. The Polish poet, and Mączynski's contemporary and friend, Jan Kochanowski, wrote an epigram (in Polish a fraszka, a short satirical poem) about the dictionary. However, because only 500 copies were printed, the price of the dictionary was high, and the fact that Mączyński was a Protestant, the impact of the dictionary on the written Polish language was limited.

Mączyński may also have contributed Polish translation equivalents to the Basel edition of a dictionary issued in 1590 under the name of the Italian lexicographer Ambrogio Calepino.