Felicjan Faleńskiʼs “The Queen” and Catholic modernism

This article analyzes the representation of Jadwiga of Anjou, the first female monarch of Poland, crowned in 1384, and a saint of the Roman Catholic Church, in Felicjan Faleński's drama The Queen. Published in 1888, the drama features a heroine whose characterization owes a great deal to the late 19th‑century religious culture, and more specifically, the debates about Catholic modernism at the turn of the 19th century. As Felicjan Faleński was by no means unaffected by them (as shown by his Meandry, a volume of ‘unkempt’ verse, published in 1892), The Queen may be claimed to be the first modernist hagiography of Queen Jadwiga in the history of Polish literature.