Focusing on the Dominican Order's activities in southeastern Poland from the canonisation of the Polish Dominican St Hyacinth (1594) to the outbreak of Bogdan Chmielnicki's Cossack revolt (1648-54) this book reveals the renovation and popularity of the pre-existing Mendicant culture of piety in the period following the Council of Trent (1545-64). In so doing, it questions both western and Polish scholarship regarding the role of the Society of Jesus, and the changes within Catholicism associated with it across Europe in the early modern period. By grounding the rivalry between Dominicans and Jesuits in patronage, politics, preaching, and the practices of piety, the study provides a holistic explanation of the reasons for Dominican expansion, the ways in which Catholicisation proceeded in a consensual political system, and suggests a corrective to the long-standing Jesuit-centred model of religious renewal. Whilst engaging with existing research regarding the post-Reformation formation of religious denominations, the book significantly expands the debate by stressing the friars' continuity with the medieval past, and demonstrating their importance in the articulation of Catholic-noble identity. Consequently, the monograph opens up new vistas on the history of the Counter-Reformation, Polish-Lithuanian noble identity, and the nature of religious renewal in a multi-ethnic and multi-denominational state.

What if, living in the past and for the past was no longer tenable - no longer acceptable? What if, being stuck in the past became a force for alienation, breaking down and coming to seem like a false consciousness divorced from the present and from all true human happiness? What if history were dead? Would that matter...? After History: On the Death of History, and the New Culture by Dr. Piotr Stolarski, gets to grip with the pretensions and soul-destroying irrelevance of academic history - arguing that a new existential historiography abandoning a Man-centred Englightenment vision (and now allied to philosophy and theology) is possible and necessary. Analysing the significance, practices and characteristics of History in detail, the author argues for the abandonment of a History dead to and disdainful of the present, and sketches the possibilities left to historians after the "Death of History" - embodied in a Neo-Renaissance eclecticism allying faith to a reformed historiography.