APOCRYPHA is a digital tool for comprehensive research and analysis of medieval New Testament Apocrypha. It was created by AMU Professor Dorota Rojszczak-Robińska, who spent six years working with a team of linguists, literary scholars and a biblical scholar to examine in detail more than 2,000 pages of manuscripts and old prints.
The arduous work has been recognised. In November last year, the research team received the Award of the Committee on Linguistics of the Polish Academy of Sciences for Outstanding Scientific Achievement in Linguistics in 2023. And it is not the only reason for glory.
APOCRYPHA, says Prof. Rojszczak-Robińska, is a ‘’side effect‘’ of a project for which she received funding in 2017 as part of the NCN SONATA Bis competition. The researchers' task was to deepen and broaden the study of Polish religious discourse and ancient spirituality and culture through a multifaceted analysis of the New Testament Apocrypha.
- "The project we undertook was primarily scientific," emphasises Rojszczak-Robińska. - Over the six years of our work, more than 50 publications were written. It is a tremendous amount of work on medieval literature and language," she says.
The Apocrypha did not emerge by chance. Professor Rojszczak-Robińska has been researching them for almost 25 years.
- "In my first year, I came across Professor Maria Adamczyk's faculty on contemporary Apocrypha. I remember that a lot of people signed up for the class, the room was small, and there were not enough seats, so the lecturer decided to select participants. I was afraid that, as a first-year student, I would be crossed off the list. However, this was not the case. The professor started talking about Abraham, and somewhere in there, she said: ‘Isaac, the only son of Abraham’. I replied at that point and said that there was another son, Ishmael, born of the slave girl Hagar. It impressed the professor, and she let me stay. That class made me realise that the fill-in-the-blank stories of the Scriptures, which I enjoyed so much as a child, are literature that has a huge tradition. This is how I started to become curious about medieval literature," recalls the researcher.
photo by Władysław Gardasz