The book presents a collection of articles authored by several members of the Warsaw School of Political Theory, affiliated with the University of Warsaw. The team of scholars, whose roots extend to the 1970s when professor Artur Bodnar founded the Political Theory Research Group at University of Warsaw's Methodical Centre for Political Science (COM SNP), has been conducting research under the leadership of professor Miros(3)aw Karwat. The school's most distinguishing features include: the acceptance of the directives and principles of methodological holism, the acceptance and creative development of holistic integral definitions, the application of sociocentric spatial analyses, and a critical approach to the "cratocentric" tradition.

The book discusses how the most severe abuses of political power, traditionally termed from the ancient times as 'tyranny', were presented in 16th century political philosophy, propaganda, and literature in Italy, France, England, Scotland, German countries, and Poland-Lithuania. Using a unique interdisciplinary methodology, the book is both timeless and timely as it demonstrates various approaches of acknowledged Renaissance intellectuals to the problem of tyranny and how best to avoid or fight it. The author consciously avoids categories of the classic history of ideas or political thought and instead reveals broader intellectual and cultural connections in the perception of tyranny in the 16th century and its impact on modern debates on different dangers of political abuses of power.

In 1239, king Louis IX of France performed the translation of the Crown of Thorns from Constantinople to Paris. The translation celebrations became a splendid religious festivity showing sacral foundations of Saint Louis's authority and the Capetian kingship. However, the translation of the Crown of Thorns to France had already a history under Louis's reign: French hagiographers and chroniclers affirmed that the first relics of the Crown of Thorns from Constantinople were transferred to Aachen by Charlemagne, then to Saint-Denis Abbey by Charles the Bald. The book discusses Saint Louis's translation of the Crown of Thorns as seen on the background of both Carolingian historical memory in Capetian era and Carolingian and Capetian tradition of the royal cult of relics.

The book answers fundamental questions about the processes of social negotiation of mentality shifts in communist Poland. Taking divorce, single motherhood, domestic violence and abortion as examples, it analyzes the level of acceptance toward tabus grounded in tradition, and the course of negotiating new meanings and using social exclusion when dealing with new phenomena. The author uses not only national documents, but also ego-documents and cultural texts to prove the macrosocietal dictatorship in the years 1956-1989 contributed not to the revolutionization of society at the family level, but to its perpetuation. The family references made by the communist authorities, especially in the last two decades of their regime, can be treated as one of the factors legitimizing the system.

Polish queen Marie Casimire Sobieska, French by birth, left the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth after the death of her husband king John III and settled in Rome in 1699. Supported by her son, Prince Aleksander Sobieski, the queen dowager created at her Roman residence in Palazzo Zuccari one of Rome's most important opera theatres. She used music and drama to uphold her social status and political plans, satisfy her aesthetic needs, and provide entertainment for the granddaughter under her care, along with her ever more ailing son. This is the first monograph about Sobieska's music patronage. The book describes works by such eminent artists as Carlo S. Capece, Filippo Juvarra, and Domenico Scarlatti, along with the atmosphere of Rome of that time, the sociopolitical role of the festa, and the music theatre genres it employed.

The monograph describes the history of the Polish diaspora in the Habsburg monarchy in the historical, institutional, legal, political, and organizational context. In the period of the Dual Monarchy (1867-1918), the Poles who lived under the Austro-Hungarian regime sought to influence the fate of their nation and state primarily through an active involvement in parliamentary life and state administration. The study of the social and political activity of the Poles in the Austrian partition reveals their political heritage, which influenced not only the Polish idea of patriotism but also the formation of the Polish political culture rooted in the European tradition of parliamentarism and constitutionalism.

This monograph demonstrates that the books of Exodus-Numbers, taken together, are the result of one, highly creative, hypertextual reworking of the book of Deuteronomy. This detailed reworking consists of around 1,200 strictly sequentially organized conceptual, and at times also linguistic correspondences between Exodus-Numbers and Deuteronomy. The strictly sequential, hypertextual dependence on Deuteronomy explains numerous surprising features of Exodus-Numbers. The critical analysis of Exodus-Numbers as a coherently composed hypertextual work disproves hypotheses of the existence in these writings of Priestly and non-Priestly materials or multiple literary layers.

This monograph demonstrates that the book of Genesis is a result of highly creative, hypertextual reworking of the book of Deuteronomy. This detailed reworking consists of around 1,000 strictly sequentially organized conceptual, and at times also linguistic correspondences between Genesis and Deuteronomy. The strictly sequential, hypertextual dependence on Deuteronomy explains numerous surprising features of Genesis. The critical analysis of Genesis as a coherently composed hypertextual work disproves hypotheses of the existence in this writing of Priestly and non-Priestly materials or multiple literary layers.

This book is the first integral study of the history of imitative or co-creative artistic work that has led to the creation of cello transcriptions and arrangements. Of an interdisciplinary character, it explores the views that have shaped approaches to the art of cello performance and describes the role of cello transcriptions and the development of instrument making. The book also addresses issues related to philosophy, history of aesthetics and visual arts, including iconography presenting historical images of the cello. The theoretical part contains definitions and systematics that make it possible to categorise the vast amount of transcriptions, as well as descriptions and suggested recordings of a selection of those transcriptions.

This book reexamines the origins and growth of the medieval inquisition which provided a framework for the large-scale operations against religious dissidents. In the last quarter of the twelfth century, the papacy launched concerted efforts to hunt out heretics, mostly Cathars and Waldensians, and directed operations against them all across Latin Christendom. The bull of Pope Lucius III Ad abolendam of 1184 became a turning point in the formation of the inquisitorial system which made both the clergy and the laity responsible for suppressing any religious dissent. From a comparative perspective, the study analyzes political, social and religious developments which in the High Middle Ages gave birth to the mechanism of repression and religious violence supervised by the papacy and operated by bishops and, starting from the 1230s, papal inquisitors, extraordinary judges delegate staffed mostly by Dominican and Franciscan friars.

This is a book about impending catastrophe. The metaphorical insane "run" ends with the outbreak of the First World War. The book focuses on European culture of the late nineteenth century and the Polish contribution to it. The word "dark" used to describe modernity is understood as a metaphor of gradual and permanent devaluation of the idea of progress, as a fading hope for the future of Europe as bright, predictable, prosperous, and safe. The "darkening" also receives a literal sense. At the end of the nineteenth century, darkness found its way back to the public space - in the theaters, panoramas, dioramas, and "love tunnels", which awaited the visitors of American and European amusement parks.

In the nineteenth century, state policy towards prostitution was primarily shaped by an assessment of its role in spreading venereal diseases. In this book, the author traces normative and organisational efforts of the authorities of the Kingdom of Poland, which sought to maintain control over prostitution and the health of women who offered paid sexual services. The author uses data collected by the police and medical authorities supervising legal and illegal prostitution to provide a demographic and sociological picture of the big-city and small-town market of sexual commerce. It was only in the early twentieth century when prostitution became an important subject of the Polish public debate, a process which is described in the book against the backdrop of the major issues and fears of the epoch.

Ancient Greek history holds a special place in the works of many 19th-c. writers. The same goes for Cyprian Norwid, one of the most eminent poets in the history of Polish literature, a thinker, and an artist. This book scrutinizes Norwid's fascination with Greek history and culture, especially his peculiar synthesis of Greek thought and Christianity. It focuses on the key themes of the relationship of Platonism with early Christian writings and their presence in Norwid's contemporary culture, the opposition of memory and history in 19th-c. literature and social life, and the image of the artist and its influence on social life in modern everyday. The book analyzes Norwid's oeuvre in a broad comparison with representatives of French, German, and British literature and the humanities.

In recent years, the terms "ethics," "politics," "performativity," and "experience" have proliferated throughout the discourse of the humanities. However, it is rarely noted that their contemporary understanding has been shaped by the works of Jacques Derrida, who has employed all these concepts since the mid-1960s. The aim of this book is to present the lesser discussed topics of Derrida's thought - not only as the creator of a specific mode of interpretation called "deconstruction" but also as an initiator of recent ethical and political reflection, a pioneer of performatics, and a precursor of current research on experience. At the same time, the book provides a panorama of the most important changes in the humanities of the last thirty years, and in particular - the ethical, performative, and empirical turns.

This book presents a collection of essays discussing a history of the five myths of Dionysus, Narcissus, Prometheus, Marcolf, and Labyrinth in twentieth-century literature. The author traces their transformations against the wider backdrop of Polish and European literature. The book is an excellent, thought-provoking lesson in understanding the signs of contemporary culture and a fascinating journey through its complex trails.

The book presents the discoveries made by the Polish archaeological mission in Saqqara, the central part of the largest ancient Egyptian royal necropolis. The area adjacent to the Pyramid of King Djoser on the monument's west side, so far neglected by archaeologists, turned out to be an important burial place of the Egyptian nobility from two periods of Pharaonic history: the Old Kingdom (the late third millennium BC) and the Ptolemaic Period (the late first millennium BC). The earlier, lower cemetery yielded rock-hewn tombs with splendid wall decoration in relief and painting. The book also describes methods of conservation applied to the discovered artefacts and episodes from the mission's life.

Post-analytical philosophy of law departs from the traditional view which considers philosophical cognition merely as a sense-making and optimizing activity. It also questions the apparently universal and objective character of the theorems put forward by existing analytical philosophy. Just like every scientific trend whose name is supplemented with the "post" prefix, it does not break with its past, but rather seeks to critically revisit its established achievements. The main goal of post-analytical philosophy is no longer to impose a conceptual structure upon chaos in the realm of legal and political phenomena. Rather, it seeks to deconstruct the analytical, both philosophical and legal, narrative to expose it as a collection of schemes which oversimplify - if not mystify - the legal and political reality. This kind of diagnosis paves the way towards the construction of a positive program of post-analytical philosophy of law, which the focus of this book.

Polish Literature and the Holocaust (1939-1968) scrutinizes literary and documentary testimonies produced during or after the extermination of Jews in the Second World War and rooted in that historical, political, and anthropological context. Whether someone wrote a text during or after the war influenced the nature of what was communicated. Hence, the authors divided this publication to separately cover two periods: 1939-1944/45 and 1945-1968. This publication overviews belles-lettres, personal document literature, and press publications. Almost all texts were written in the Polish language. The genre category constitutes the basic compositional criterion. The individual parts of our publication discuss poetry, narrative prose, personal document literature, and the press discourse.

The book analyses the ideological and philosophical basis of Zionism, i.e. how Zionism solved the most important problems of Jews in the last decades of the 19th century: the problem of assimilation, the philosophical principles of national identity, the idea of self-liberation and the conception of the Jewish state. Another problem discussed in this book is how the religious idea of "Return to Zion" became both philosophical and political goals. All considerations are based on the analysis of the source texts of the protagonists and founders of Zionism (Hess, Pinsker, Herzl and Nordau). Zionism is also shown in the perspective of its strength and weakness, as well as its importance for Jewishness in general.

This book focuses on the question of relationality. Despite the numerous motifs introduced to the discourse pertaining to Margaret S. Archer's concept, we notice that some often reappear. What frequently appears is the concept of agency, closely related to the matter of the subject's reflexivity. We also include papers that refer to methodological dilemmas. However, all collected texts directly consider the essence of the concept of the human person and society in reaction to the ontology of the person proposed by Archer. The common thread and horizon of these elaborations is Archer's concept and Pierpaolo Donati's relational sociology. Thus, this publication seeks to gain broader public and open new research perspectives in sociology.

The author takes readers on a journey in the footsteps of Harlequin and Pulcinella, two well-known commedia dell'arte masks, to show the historically fluctuating way in which they participated in building "Italianness" in the eyes of foreign theatre audiences (the history of the Harlequin mask in France, Italy and Poland in the XVII and XVIII century) and local ones (the history of the Pulcinella mask, or the Italian dialect theatre of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which historians, at a certain point, erased from the process of the creation and construction of the Italian national community). Using modern performance studies methodologies, this book effectively cuts the distance between past and present theatre practices, opening new prospects for an active and clearly situated epistemology for theatre studies, cultural studies, media studies, and performance studies.