Los campesinos medievales y su mundo en la historiografía polaca

Since the nineteenth-century beginnings of Polish historiography, medievalists have viewed the peasants and their world as an aspect of several other major subjects, which jointly constitute that historiography: ducal and royal power; economic and material history; cultural history, expressed as interest in «Slavic antiquities»; interethnic relations, above all among Poles and Germans; and the connections between the mental and the material that define the Polish relationship to the Annales school. The subject of the peasants and their world is therefore rather difficult to separate from the historiography in its entirety, and to update. This article uses a selection of important works concerning several of the related, constitutive subjects in the historiography, and of works concerning the peasants and their world in particular, to illustrate several trends in the treatment of our subject, and to bring that treatment to the historiographical present.