Czy Mikołaj Rej jest autorem prozatorskiej parafrazy Psałterza Dawidowego? O dylematach badacza w ustalaniu autorstwa dawnych tekstów

The aim of the article is to address the problem of the authorship of the anonymous prose paraphrase of David’s Psalter, ascribed to Mikolaj Rej. It also deals with scholars’ difficulty of establishing the authorship of old texts, which is the result of insufficient scientific methods, based on the analysis of the whole text (the frequency method, the lexical test). It is often the case that such difficulties arise in a situation in which the text is heterogeneous, created by the cooperation of a number of authors. The analyses show that the most effective scientific method concerning the anonymous Psalter is the use of Gustav Herdan’s stylometrical method and the compilation of frequency dictionaries, separately for each of the psalms. Moreover, the syntactic features of particular psalms could be dealt with by means of a statistic research. It proves justifiable and necessary to use the stylometrical method in order to verify the previous, sometimes contradictory results of scholars, formulated on the basis of intuitive observations.