Scots In The Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth 16th To 18th Centuries

This book offers an examination of Scottish migration to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: numbers of migrants; patterns of settlement; laws regulating their presence; their activities; their social advancement into the Polish nobility; their assimilation and then the eventual disappearance as a distinct ethnic group in Poland-Lithuania.

In the period between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries a considerable number of Scots migrated to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Some sojourned there for some time, while others stayed permanently and exercised commercial business and crafts. The migration stopped in the eighteenth century, and the Scots who remained in Poland seem to have lost their ethnic identity. This book offers an examination and assessment of this migration: numbers of migrants; patterns of settlement; laws regulating Scottish presence in Poland-Lithuania; their commercial, academic, religious and military activities; their social advancement into the Polish nobility; their assimilation and then the eventual disappearance as a distinct ethnic group in Poland-Lithuania.

This book offers an in-depth history of Calvinism in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth 1548-1648. It traces the development of polity, liturgy, piety and church discipline. Bem questions the prevailing narrative of decline post 1570 and argues that the three Reformed Churches in fact continued to develop and flourish until the 1630s.

Publishing Subversive Texts in Elizabeth England and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth provides original and thorough comparative analyses of the effects of national censorship in early modern England and Poland-Lithuania on the intellectual and information exchange in both countries.

This volume provides a fresh perspective of the history and legacy of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, as well as the often-disputed memory of it in contemporary Europe. The unions between the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania have fascinated many readers particularly because many solutions that have been implemented in the European Union have been adopted from its Central and Eastern European predecessor. The collection of essays presented in this volume are divided into three parts – the Beginnings of Poland-Lithuania, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Legacy and Memory of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth – and represent a selection of the papers delivered at the Third Congress of International Researchers of Polish History which was held in Cracow on 11-14 October 2017. Through their application of different historiographical perspectives and schools of history they offer the reader a fresh take on the Commonwealth’s history and legacy, as well as the memory of it in the countries that are its inheritors, namely Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus and Ukraine. An exploration of one of the biggest countries in Early Modern Europe, this will be of interest to historians, political scientists, cultural anthropologists and other scholars of the history of Central and Eastern Europe in the Early Modern period.

To mark the 800th anniversary of the ratification of the Magna Carta by King John at Runnymede, Magna Carta provides the central European perspectives on this monumental document and its impact on the political and legal experiences of freedom, from the medieval period to the present day. The volume gives rise to a discussion about the legacy of the Magna Carta as one of the fundamental elements of European identity. Supported by previously untranslated sources at the end of each chapter, the team of contributors consider the lasting legacy of Magna Carta in Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland and Lithuania. The authors present the successful attempts to limit royal power by law while protecting the priveleges of the nobility carried out throughout the region from the thirteenth to eighteenth centuries. Each chapter considers the historical and political contexts behind these efforts, the processes by which political and legal institutions were subsequently formed and finally examines the legacy of those institutions which are today found in constitutional identities, constitutional arrangements and political projects across Central Europe. A preface by Robert Blackburn draws the collection together, highlighting the continued universal significance of the Magna Carta. This original title will enable students and academics alike to see for themselves the reverberations the Magna Carta caused in medieval Europe and beyond from a fresh and unusual perspective.

In The Great Immigration Waldemar Kowalski provides an analysis of urbanized Scots in Little Poland from the 1570s to the 1660s, including their commercial activities and the networks they built in their host communities, particularly in Cracow.

Traditional accounts of the Scottish Enlightenment present the half-century or so before 1750 as, at best, a not-yet fully realised precursor to the era of Hume and Smith, at worst, a period of superstition and religious bigotry. This is the first book-length study to systematically challenge that notion. Instead, it argues that the era between approximately 1680 and 1745 was a 'First' Scottish Enlightenment, part of the continent-wide phenomenon of early Enlightenment and led by the Jacobites, Episcopalians, and Catholics of north-eastern Scotland. It makes this argument through an intensive study of the dramatic changes in historiographical practice which took place in Scotland during this era, showing how the documentary scholarship of Jean Mabillon and the Maurists was eagerly received and rapidly developed in Scottish historical circles, resulting in the wholesale demolition of the older, Humanist myths of Scottish origins and their replacement with the foundations of our modern understanding of early Scottish history. This volume accordingly challenges many of the truisms surrounding seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Scottish history, pushing back against notions of pre-Enlightenment Scotland as backward, insular, and intellectually impoverished and mapping a richly polymathic, erudite, and transnational web of scholars, readers, and polemicists. It highlights the enduring cultural links with France and argues for the central importance of Scotland's two principal religious minorities—Episcopalians and Catholics—in the growth of Enlightenment thinking. As such, it makes a major intervention in the intellectual and cultural histories of Scotland, early modern Europe, and the Enlightenment itself.