Katalog szlachty biography examples

Contributor: Teresa Rączka-Jeziorska

Location: The Adam Mickiewicz Museum of Literature in Warsaw

Description (English): These pages of manuscript come from a richly ornamented and once padlocked carmine book from the years 1815-1841, held since 1996 in the collection of the Adam Mickiewicz Museum of Literature in Warsaw. On these pages, we can see a verse by Kazimierz Bujnicki, a talented literary doyen of Polish Romanticism. This small, handy canvas and paper object, partially covered in leather with sophisticated ornamentation, the back and cover of which bore a gilded plant motif, suggests to us today a girl’s intimate diary or a secret casket. Such items in the first half of the nineteenth century were usually referred to as an “autograph book”, an “album amicorum”, or a “Stammbuch”. This particular example belonged to Michalina of Weyssenhoff Targońska (1803-1880), niece of General Jan Weyssenhoff (1774-1848), who was a participant in the Kościuszko Uprising (1794), the Napoleonic Wars and the November Uprising (1830-1831). Although she did not, as was the romantic fashion of the period, place a knot of hair or dried flowers into her album amicorum, she kept equally precious treasures of memory within it. It bears witness, indeed, to the Romantic culture of memory given a patriotic turn.

Following Gaston Bachelard, a phenomenologist of creative imagination, and yielding to the inevitable temptation to “break into” the contents of this album, one can see that those treasures were hidden in over eighty pages with exquisitely gilded edges (Bachelard, p. 79-91). They include dedicated fragments of poetry and apothegms running to several verses (mainly in French but also in Polish, German and Russian), copies of poems, fancy stickers made of blue paper (sometimes pierced with a needle), emblematic drawings, sentimental sketches, landscapes and genre scenes, and even elaborate colourful embroideries. Individual entries compete with ea

Table Of Contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• About the Author
• About the Book
• This eBook can be cited
• Contents
• Editors’ Preface
• Introduction
• History of a Society, not of a Nation
• The Question of Nations in the Early Modern Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
• Structure and Periodization
• The State of Research and Literature on the Subject
• Chapter One: Physiognomy of the Commonwealth
• 1. Names, Emblems, Capitals
• 1.1. Name
• 1.2. Emblem and Coats of Arms of the Lands
• 1.3. Capital Cities
• 2. Geographical Position and Natural Conditions
• 2.1. Geographical Position
• 2.2. Natural Conditions
• 2.3. Geopolitical Location
• 2.4. Region of East-Central Europe
• 3. Federative Commonwealth
• 3.1. Granular Structure of Early Modern Europe
• 3.2. Federative Structure of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
• 3.3. The Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
• 3.3.1. Terms of the Union of 1569
• 3.3.2. Consequences and Appraisals of the Polish-Lithuanian Union
• 3.3.3. The Influence of the Union on the Rise of Magnates’ Power
• 3.3.4. Legal and Constitutional Consequences of the Polish-Lithuanian Union
• 4. Territory
• 4.1. Territory of the State
• 4.2. Administrative and Judicial Divisions
• 4.2.1. The Crown
• 4.2.2. Great Poland and Little Poland
• 4.2.3. Masovia