The first articles in this volume focus on sources for the history of Baltic commerce and the evaluation of their data on prices. In most cases, though, surviving data is hardly adequate for any extensive quantitative analysis of Polish economic history, and many of these articles endeavour in different ways to use comparitive approaches to help overcome this lack of substantial statistical base - hence the set of studies on the economy of travelling and the observations of travellers. Professor Maçzak then turns to the structures of power in Poland and elsewhere in late renaissance Europe, looking in particular at informal power relationships and patterns of patronage. In terms of the Polish-Lithunaian state, he would hold that centralized government was already critically weakened in the late 15th century, and the 16th century saw the creation of a new power structure, based on local self-government, and dominated by the nobility.

The wealth of the Central European archives, particularly in urban records, has not been fully realised by Western European historians. However, the records are not always straightforward to use and many studies tackle the methodological problems inherent in gathering and analysing medieval sources. This book presents an original review of past and present research of national historiographies on medieval financial history from Central Europe. Covering material ranging from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, it explores the eastern regions of the Holy Roman Empire, including Bohemia, Silesia, Austria and Germany, and extending to Poland and Hungary. The authors firstly discuss the monetary policy of the Holy Roman emperors during the Middle Ages, before moving on to wider aspects of state finance, including credit mechanisms used by rulers. The book then investigates civic records and what they reveal about urban life and trade. It lastly investigates the financial activities of the church, from papacy to the cathedral chapters in Prague. Using numismatic and documentary evidence, Money and Finance in Central Europe during the Later Middle Ages provides an invaluable point of comparison with the financial conditions in Western Europe during the Middle Ages.

This comprehensive study examines Polish demonology in relation to witchcraft trials in Wielkopolska, revealing the witch as a force for both good and evil. It explores the use of witchcraft, the nature of accusations and the role of gender.

In the early-modern period, the Dutch called the grain trade on the Baltic the 'mother of all trades', as they considered it to be the basis of most of their trade and shipping and indeed the cornerstone of the Dutch economy. For a very long time the mass grain exports from the Baltic were dominated by the Dutch, and Amsterdam was the central entrepôt from which the grain was distributed over the Dutch hinterland and the rest of Europe. This book aims to present a general history of the 'mother of all trades' and particularly shows the fundamental importance for transaction costs, including the costs for transport, insurance and protection, the quality of the local services sector in Amsterdam, the influence of monetary and mercantile policies, and the efficiency of trade organization.

The studies collected here deal with social and cultural changes in Polish lands during the early phases of industrialisation, i.e. the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Attention is first given to the stabilisation of urban agglomerations and workers' communities, and the accompanying transformations in social status, family structure, and collective life and culture of the workers. An especial focus is the cultural transformations which occurred at the time of the 1905-1907 revolution in the Kingdom of Poland, incorporating it into tsarist Russia. In parallel with this, Professor Zarnowska has been concerned to examine the gender-determined inequalities of the life opportunities of women and men, and how these altered as social modernisation in Poland progressed. She looks at the changing legal and social status of women and their life chances, as well as the emergence of new social models of women's roles. Several studies are also devoted to the impact exerted by urban civilisation, as well as the growing professional activity of women upon the changes to cultural norms regulating the relations between women and men, as well as the development of women's aspirations in the family, society and culture.

The subject of this book is the economic backwardness of Poland and Eastern Europe in the modern era. The studies in the first part analyse various aspects of the region's economic and social history in the period from the 16th to the 20th centuries; those in the second part deal with the change following the fall of state socialism. Professor Kochanowicz here argues that, for understanding the present, it is necessary to take into consideration historical legacies.

Outside the imagination, witches don't exist. But in Poland and in Europe and its colonies in the early modern period, people imagined their neighbours to be witches, with tragic results. For the first time in English, Michael Ostling tells the story of the imagined Polish witches, showing how ordinary peasant-women got caught in webs of suspicion and accusation, finally confessing under torture to the most heinous of crimes. Through a close reading of accusations and confessions, Ostling also shows how witches imagined themselves and their own religious lives. Paradoxically, the tales they tell of infanticide and host-desecration reveal to us a culture of deep Catholic piety, while the stories they tell of demonic sex and the treasure-bringing ghosts of unbaptized babies uncover a complex folklore at the margins of Christian orthodoxy. Caught between the devil and the host, the self-imagined Polish witches reflect the religion of their place and time, even as they stand accused of subverting and betraying that religion. Through the dark glass of witchcraft Ostling explores the religious lives of early modern women and men: their gender attitudes, their Christian faith and folk cosmology, their prayers and spells, their adoration of Christ incarnate in the transubstantiated Eucharist, and their relations with goblin-like house demons and ghosts.