Place, People, Texts
What is Poland? If the meaning of apparently stable words such as ecclesia has been anything but stable historically, the same is of course true of ‘Poland’, a simple noun which masks multiple possible meanings and polemical intents. For the sixteenth century, Poland should be defined not as an ethnic people (a nascent nation state), but rather as a political phenomenon. As such, this study will consider all the peoples and territories under the authority of the Polish Crown in the reign of King Sigismund I, regardless of their ‘ethnic’ or linguistic status. Twenty years ago, John Elliott coined the phrase ‘composite monarchies’, pointing out that most early modern monarchies were patchworks of territories acquired at various times by different means (marriage, conquest, inheritance), held together by one monarch....