A Response to Urszula Augustyniak’s Review of My Book Sarmatismus. Die Politische Ideologie des Polnischen Adels im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert in APH 121/2020
A Response to Urszula Augustyniak’s Review of My Book "Sarmatismus. Die Politische Ideologie des Polnischen Adels im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert in APH 121/2020"

Summary/Abstract: The main allegation in Urszula Augustyniak’s crushing review of my book on Sarmatian ideology is that everything I wrote is essentially already common knowledge to Polish historians and that at best some German readers might learn something new from it. This judgment came as a great surprise to me, because I had had contact with her on several occasions in the course of my research, and she knew exactly what my subject was, but she never suggested to me either that I was wasting my time or that in granting me a scholarship to write the work the rector of the University of Poznań was squandering public money. Indeed, many Polish historians I met encouraged me to do it, opining that a monograph on Sarmatian ideology was a desideratum. None of them, moreover, suggested to me that this was a subject so “thematically and methodologically complex” (despite Polish historiography allegedly already having written everything about it) that few scholars would be equal to it, as Augustyniak now asserts in order to explain why to date there is in fact no monograph on Sarmatian ideology.

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