Framing the Polish Family in the Past

This volume shows how families in different contexts - noble, urban, legal, religious - and across different periods of history from the late Middle Ages to the modern era, shaped the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and its successor states, pre-partitioned and post-partitioned Poland. Contributors draw on a diverse range of different sources including rural and urban court registers, church registers, and population surveys to examine the economic bases of families as well as marital and family conflicts. The sources and the applied research methods enable contributors to characterize families led not only by men but also by single women. New research methods employed include approaches to family structures drawn from sociology, such as life-cycle and life-course analysis, as well as anthropological methods to reconstruct kinship in communities. Spanning several centuries, and from the river Oder to the Black Sea, the Baltic, Lithuania, Belarus and the Ukrainian borderlands, this volume is a major contribution to the historiography on East Central Europe, a region still too often omitted from histories of Europe.

Framing the Polish Family in the Past will appeal to researchers and students alike in Polish and Lithuanian History and Medieval and Early Modern Society and Culture.

Piotr Guzowski is a Scientific Secretary of the Center for the Study on Demographic and Economic Structures of Preindustrial Central and Eastern Europe at the University of Bialystok, Poland and member of the Faculty of History and International Relations of the University of Bialystok. He specializes in economic history, historical demography, and environmental history. He is the author of two books published in Polish: Chlopi i pieniądze na przelomie średniowiecza i czasów nowożytnych, Kraków 2008 [Peasants and money at the turn of the Middle Ages] and Rodzina szlachecka w Polsce przedrozbiorowej, Bialystok 2019 [Noble family in Prepartition Poland. Demographic study].

Professor Cezary Kuklo is the Head of the Department of History of Demographic, Economic and Religious Structures at the Faculty of History and International Relations at the University of Bialystok and the director of the Center for the Study on Demographic and Economic Structures of Preindustrial Central and Eastern Europe at this University. He is also the chairman of the Commission for the History of Demographic and Social Structures of the Committee for Historical Sciences of the Polish Academy of Sciences and Vice-president of the Polish Historical Society. He has published over 410 papers and 6 books, including: Demografia Rzeczypospolitej przedrozbiorowej, Warszawa 2009 [Demography of the Pre-Partition Commonwealth] and The population of the Holy Cross Parish in Warsaw in the 18 Century, Bialystok 2016.