‘Everyday Life’ in the Works of Maria Bogucka

Wiślicz, Tomasz

doi:2450-8462

Download

Title: ‘Everyday Life’ in the Works of Maria Bogucka

Abstract:

The article discusses the use of the category of ‘everyday life’ in historical works by Maria Bogucka as well as her theoretical contributions on the subject. Her pioneering role in adapting the mode of popular writing advanced by the French cycle Histoire de la vie quotidienne to Polish historiography in the 1960s established a high-quality standard on Polish scholars by combining original research into economic and social history with references to the history of material culture and mentalities. A quarter of a century after the publication of her exemplary study entitled Życie codzienne w Gdańsku: wiek XVI–XVII [Everyday Life in Gdańsk: Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 1967], Bogucka involved herself in contemporary debates within the international community of historians over the German Alltagsgeschichte, perceiving it as a methodological framework for innovative research and an opportunity to expand the theoretical side of cultural history. Though she would not produce another ‘history of everyday life’ – in a refreshed perspective and with more robust theoretical foundations – her studies into old Polish customs betray an inspiration with the German research current of Alltagsgeschichte, which blossomed in the early 1990s.

References:

Schulze Winfried (ed.), Sozialgeschichte, Alltagsgeschichte, Mikro-Historie. Eine Diskussion (Göttingen, 1994)
Szarota Tomasz, ‘Życie codzienne – temat badawczy czy tylko popularyzacja? Na marginesie serii wydawniczych Hachette i PIW-u’, Kwartalnik Historii Kultury Materialnej, xliv, 3 (1996), 239–45
Bogucka Maria, ‘Controversies about “Everyday Life”: Profile of Research and Definition’, Acta Poloniae Historica, 85 (2002), 5–16
Bogucka Maria, Staropolskie obyczaje w XVI–XVII wieku (Warszawa, 1994)
Carrard Philippe, Poetics of the New History. French Historical Discourse from Braudel to Chartier (Baltimore–London, 1992)
Schilling Derek, ‘Everyday Life and the Challenge to History in Postwar France: Braudel, Lefebvre, Certeau’, Diacritics, xxxiii, 1 (2003), 23–40
Bystroń Jan S., Dzieje obyczajów w dawnej Polsce. Wiek XVI–XVII, i–ii (Warszawa, 1932–4)
Kochanowicz Jacek and Anna Sosnowska, ‘Economic History of Pre-industrial Poland. An Obsolete Subject?’, in Francesco Ammannati (ed.), Dove Va la Storia Economica?: Metodi e Prospettive, Secc. XIII–XVIII (Firenze, 2011), 153–72
Bogucka Maria, The Lost World of the ‘Sarmatians’. Custom as the Regulator of Polish Social Life in Early Modern Times (Warszawa, 1996)
Bogucka Maria, ‘Gesture, Ritual, and Social Order in Sixteenth- to Eighteenth-Century Poland’, in Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg (eds), A Cultural History of Gesture. From Antiquity to the Present Day (Cambridge, 1991), 190–209
Eley Geoff, ‘Labor History, Social History, “Alltagsgeschichte”: Experience, Culture, and the Politics of the Everyday – a New Direction for German Social History?’, Journal of Modern History, lxi, 2 (1989), 297–343
Certeau Michel de, L’Invention du quotidien, i: Arts de faire (Paris, 1980)
Crew David F., ‘Alltagsgeschichte: A New Social History “From below”?’, Central European History, xxii, 3/4 (1989), 394–407
Bogucka Maria, Das alte Danzig. Alltagsleben vom 15. bis 17. Jahrhundert (Leipzig, 1980)
Siewierski Tomasz, Marian Małowist i krąg jego uczniów. Z dziejów historiografii gospodarczej w Polsce (Warszawa, 2016)
Frost Robert I., [Review], ‘Maria Bogucka, The Lost World of the ‘Sarmatians’. Custom as the Regulator of Polish Social Life in Early Modern Times’, English Historical Review, cxiii, 454 (1998), 1288–9
Lüdtke Alf (ed.), The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life (Princeton, 1995)