The Good Old Days?: Piast and Jagiellonian Kings in the Eyes of Early Modern Polish Thinkers

• In Event: 300 Years Ago: History and Memory of Premodern Poland

Abstract

This paper studies the dynastic memory and utopian mentality of late Jagiellonian and Commonwealth-period political thinkers, with a focus on their evocations of Polish kings from the twelfth to fifteenth centuries and in the context of their searching and yearning for the ideal society. Specifically, I will discuss three of the most famous Polish intellectuals in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries: Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski (1503-1572), Andrzej Maksymilian Fredro (1620-1679), and Stanisław Konarski (1700-1773). I wonder how and whether their remembrance of the deeds and ideas of earlier Polish rulers made an impact on their respective political reform blueprints in their own time. Another critical question to be addressed here is that since when the domestic past prevailed over the classical past in early modern Polish intellectual discourse, or put differently, since when the dominant Italian Renaissance thinking lost its fashion in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Author

• Václav Algirdas Zheng, Johns Hopkins U