Joanna Orzeł

University of Lodz

‘Egodocument’ in the Research of Polish Scholars of the Early Modern Period – Fashion for Terminology or Modern Research?

It has been less than fifteen years since the term ‘egodocument’ was popularised in the Polish scholarly discussion. The terminology has been adopted in some circles of researchers of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth times – mainly historians concerned with the culture, customs, mentality of the nobility, less frequently with the bourgeoisie or peasants, but also among historians specialising in the literature of the 16th–18th centuries. It seems, however, that some of their published works refer to the term ‘egodocument’ without explaining their understanding of it. It is therefore legitimate to ask whether the term is merely a trend in the analyses of Polish scholars to appear in the title, key words or introduction of their works, or whether it involves a new approach in relation to research on diaries, memoirs, journals, correspondence, which has been conducted in the traditional way since the 19th century. A further question is the amount of egodocumental information in the sources from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth era – we may wonder if it is large enough to make comparisons with Western European sources.