Imaginations and Configurations of Polish Society: From the Middle Ages through the Twentieth Century

Analyzes of the changing understanding of community and society against the background of Poland's thousand-year history.

Poland is a European community with a thousand-year history, but its territory, governance contexts and population structure have changed greatly over the centuries. Social development and differentiation can therefore only be inadequately captured by the categories of national historiography.

The authors deliberately shift the state perspective to the background and focus on much smaller political, social and cultural units. The conceptual starting point is the question about changing ideas about community and society: what criteria were used to determine membership in the political and cultural elite in each case? What alternative or competing conceptions of community existed? How has migration affected society? How were politically marginal groups organized? What was the significance of political changes at the local level?