Kazimierz Baran survey history published in English by Irena Kwiatkowska Malinowska in Q^uaderni Fiorentini per la Storia del Pensiero Giurdico Moderno 15 (1986), Milano, Dott. A. Giuffre Editore. The title of her contribution is Legal history research in Poland at present andin thepast. Kwiatkowska discussed with some detail the research lines followed by such founders of Polish legal history as Romuald Hube, Antoni Helcel, Jan Wincenty Bandtke, Wtadyslaw Abraham, etc. Her article was ended with an outline of major research drifts as represented in the respective Polish University centres up to the early 1980’s. Thus Kwiatkowska’s article represents a precious synthesis for everyone interested in getting some orientation in what was done in the past and what is being done in the niveau of legal history in Poland. There is also one more volume that I would like to highly recommend to the non-Polish speaker studying the 17'*^ centurv Polish constitutional ideas and their practical implementation. The discussed volume is Memoirs of the Polish Baroque, The writing of Jan Chryzostom Pasek, a squire of the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania (ed. transl. by Catherine S. Leach, University of California Press 1976, Berkeley, Los Angelos, London). The volume contains a lot of material fascinating for everyone interested in the details of life in seventeenth century Eastern Europe as well as in legal historv. The book is a particularly successful translation into English of the memoirs written by a typical Polish seventeenth century squireJan Chryzostom Pasek, an individual gifted in prose writing. These are eye-witness’ reports that leave a really picturesque image of how constitutional devices functioned (free election of the monarch, local assemblies of the gentry, etc.). Pasek’s. memoirs smuggle also some image of concepts current among the nobility of the past on their own dignity, legal status, customs, behaviour patterns, etc. What is particularly precious is that the book is also its introduction with a detailed description of constitutional devices of the old Republic. In the context of studies of the old-time Polish-Lithuanian institutions I would like to mention one more research line that deserves some attention. This is the line picked up within the framework of Polish-Jewish reconciliation efforts.This research line has theJewish autonomy mthe old-time Poland as its subject-matter. The Commonwealth had particularly large Jewish community in the past. By the end of the 18^^ century theJewry of Poland-Lithuania made up perhaps 70%of all Jews living in the world. Throughout the 16'*^ through 18'^^ centuries these Jews arrived at a really successful autonomy within the boundries of the Respublica. This was possible only in the countury laying so much emphasis on the self-governmental mechanisms and being so far from bureaucratic structures typical of absolutism. The Commonwealth was a multi-ethnic organismand every distinctly outlined national group, thus also the Jews, could govern themselves as they willed provided that they complied with general laws and paid taxes. 312
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