Help me find some early modern history about Poland/Eastern Europe

January 3, 2023 3:08 PM

I recently finished Olga Tokarczuk's "The Books of Jacob" and loved it. I'd like to delve deeper into its real life setting, and am looking for book recommendations about 17th/18th century Poland and the northern part of the Ottoman Empire in Europe in the same era.

My interest is fairly broad based and I'm mostly looking for non-fiction history here, but if there's other fiction out there that you'd recommend, please feel free. Please note: I'm (sadly) limited to English.

posted by thivaia to Education (6 answers total)

Response by poster: *reading in English,* that is. This is what I get for trying to say "It would be hugely useful to me if there were an English translation available" in a less obvious way.
posted by thivaia at 3:13 PM on January 3, 2023

Best answer: I lived in Poland for a few years and found Norman Davies' books on Polish history a good place to start when I was trying to answer similar questions. Your time period is probably best addressed by the first volume of God's Playground, which is a full history of the Polish lands to 1795.
posted by mdonley at 4:06 PM on January 3, 2023 [3 favorites]

When my Polish father-in-law retired, his kids got him a copy of Adam Zamoyski’s history of Poland to go along with a trip to Krakow. I’ve never read it personally, but I’ve read other books by Zamoyski and liked them.
posted by kevinbelt at 4:40 PM on January 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I read Zamoyski's book (The Polish Way), which covers IIRC starts around the 15th century with the Polish/Lithuanian union and runs up to the partition of Poland at the end of the 18th century. Very readable and I learned a ton about a country not covered a lot in the Anglophone histories.

Zamoyski's not an academic historian, which may be a plus or a minus for you depending. Given the scope it necessarily has some broad strokes; it goes over the biggest political, social and religious events. A lot of the framing is on the contrast between Poland and the nations to west. I thought it was well balanced but you won't get either a ton on daily life or any details about military campaigns.
posted by mark k at 9:10 PM on January 3, 2023

Best answer: The classic historical fiction depicting the era is Sienkiewicz's Trilogy - With Fire and Sword, Deluge and Pan Michael. Thanks to his Nobel prize in literature, all of these seem to have been translated into English early enough that the translations themselves are now out of copyright and available on Project Gutenberg. I haven't read that book of Tokarczuk's yet, but a Pole writing about that era without being somewhat in conversation with Sienkiewicz would be like a Brit writing about Richard III without being influenced by Shakespeare.
posted by I claim sanctuary at 10:36 PM on January 3, 2023 [3 favorites]

Best answer: Last year, I had a gripping read of Microcosm: portrait of a central European city by Norman Davies and Roger Moorhouse. It's a deep dive into the history of Wrotizla; Vretslav; Presslaw; Breßlau; Breslau; Wrocław [all same place!] including your period pf interest. Might complement some of the broad-brush recs above.
posted by BobTheScientist at 3:41 AM on January 4, 2023 [2 favorites]