Lietuvos istorijos institutas

The opening line in the preface of the first Lithuanian book prepared by Martynas Mažvydas (1547) reads imkiet mani ir ſkaitikiet (lit.) ‘take me and read’ and I suggest that this phrase may reflect the famous divine words heard by Saint Augustine: tolle lege, tolle lege ‘take up—read, take up—read’ (Confessiones VIII , 12, 29). Both phrases match with respect to the verbs, their order, and the mood, but the Lithuanian phrase is not repeated. It has two additional words (mani ‘me’, and ir ‘and’) and the verbal forms appear in the second-person plural. One should note that Lithuanian here is similar to many other languages where this phrase has become popular without the repetition and with the conjunction, cf. English take up and read, German nimm und lies, French prends et lis, Italian prendi e leggi, Polish bierz i czytaj, etc. The phrase of Mažvydas is different, however, in that it is used for the personification: the voice of the preface is attributed to the book and this is the reason why the pronominal form mani ‘me’ (accusative) was added; this rhetorical device is also known from some other sixteenth-century books. The added pronoun points to the most important part of the book, the catechism; the included hymns are referred to only once and a short primer, which appears after the preface, is never mentioned. The verbal forms are in second-person plural because the addressee of Mažvydas are plural, the brothers and sisters (BRalei ſeſeris). It is well known that Augustine was one of the most widely published and studied authors in the sixteenth century, a figure of high importance to the Reformation movement, and there are no doubts that Mažvydas was familiar with his works. Many authors of that time would use more or less known phrases in their own texts; some of them would be exact quotations accompanied by references while some would be modified to the needs of the author and bear no indication to their source. At this time we do not know if Mažvydas had really studied Augustine Confessions and we even cannot tell if the phrase tolle lege reached him directly or indirectly. If it reached him indirectly, might it had been already modified into a personified form? Despite the similarities of the phrases, we should be also rather cautious not to reject the possibility that we are dealing with a mere coincidence.