300 Years Ago: History and Memory of Premodern Poland

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

In lieu of recounting Polish history as a grand, nationalistic narrative or as a commemoration of the past from today’s vantage point, this experimental panel seeks to rethink and retell the exciting premodern history of Poland from the lens of historical memories and through a series of key historical episodes. In other words, we are interested in how “the deeper past” was remembered and evoked in “the shallower past,” and we are keen to untangle what history meant and constituted in different times. The three papers in this panel will each address a specific period and its memory of the preceding one, namely and respectively, the Piast memory of pre- and early Piast history, the Commonwealth memory of the Piast and Jagiellonian history, and the twentieth-century memory of Commonwealth history. Through this relay, we aim to gain a clear, historicist understanding of how history was recollected, ruminated upon, discussed, used, or even lost or faded in interest after roughly three centuries, a time span that is too short for the age of the Earth but long enough to pass down the memory of ten to fifteen generations. Our purview is not limited to proper history writing, but a broad range of political, intellectual, religious, and literary sources is consulted to fully comprehend the historiographical mentalities of Polish thinkers over time and place. In this way, the historical memories of and across staropolska become evident and relevant, providing a fresh perspective on our existing knowledge of Polish and Eastern European history.

Sub Unit

• Early Slavic Studies

Chair

• Patrice M. Dabrowski, Harvard U

Papers

• Of Mice in a Tower: Memory and Interpretation of the Deep Past across Piast Poland - Piotr S. Górecki, UC Riverside

• The Good Old Days?: Piast and Jagiellonian Kings in the Eyes of Early Modern Polish Thinkers - Václav Algirdas Zheng, Johns Hopkins U

• Remembering the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 20th-Century American Emigration - Larry Wolff, New York U

Discussant

• Paul W. Knoll, U of Southern California