Funded by the National Science Center

„War damage in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the seventeenth century: comparative analysis of the phenomenon in the territory of Red Ruthenia and Greater Poland in view of seventeenth century economic crisis”, SONATA BIS, no. 2016/22/E/HS3/00479, funded: 723 190 PLN, 2017–2024 (extended until 2nd August 2025), Principal Investigator: Dr Andrzej Gliwa. The main objective of the project research is to determine the scale and scope of the war damage, which affected the area of Red Ruthenia and Greater Poland in the seventeenth century. The accurate designation of the amount of war damage along with the identification of the most devastating enemy incursion, will allow to verify and analyze deeply rooted in polish historiography view of the important role of the extremely disruptive nature of war in the period of Swedish „deluge” and the thesis about the decisive significance of the middle seventeenth century for further economic development of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth associated with it. The outcome of the pilot studies on the war devastation in the area of the Land of Przemyśl in the seventeenth century and the preliminary results of research for Greater Poland in the midseventeenth century, indicate that the processes of economic regression of these regions had a slightly different course and dynamics than portrayed in the existing historical literature. These analyses suggest preliminary hypotheses with the first one stating that the war damage in the first half of the seventeenth century was of much larger scale and scope than previously estimated and the second one undermining the disastrous impact of the Swedish „deluge” on the whole area of the Commonwealth. Another important supposition is that the spatial distribution of the ravages of war in Greater Poland was quite different than in the territory of Red Ruthenia. Concentrated mainly in urban areas in Greater Poland, war damage in Red Ruthenia was focused mainly on rural areas. It was, among others, the result of military strategy of asymmetric warfare commonly used by Tatar hordes. Contrary to the military tactics used by Swedish commanders, the characteristic features of these population-centric military operation were avoiding direct clashes with the Polish troops, targeted killing and abductions of civilians as well as deliberate and indiscriminate damaging of economic infrastructure mainly on rural areas. One of the aims of the research project is to verify these hypotheses in a broader territorial context using GIS technology.

‘Secularization of the West: Tacitism from the 16th to the 18th century’, OPUS, no. 2019/35/B/HS1/04039, funded: 1 423 200 PLN, 2020–2023 (extended until 29th November 2025), Principal Investigator: Dr hab. Jan Waszink. The aim of this project is to write a history of Tacitism via the struggles and controversies that surrounded it. By interpreting the rhetorical make-up and strategies of each of the selected texts in its contemporary social and political context, we can obtain a picture of the controversies and contested ideas at stake in that context. A series of these stories thus builds up into a history of the Tacitist movement. Eventually, by the end of the 17th century, Tacitism had lost its controversial edge and become part of mainstream European political thought, a clear indication that that political thought itself had changed. Meanwhile, the foundations of the modern discipline of political science had been laid by scholars of Tacitist inspiration, and they had made an important contribution to the foundations of economics as a science. This history of Tacitism will not only shed light on a crucial early phase in the emergence of modern political thought and attitudes, but it will also show how European societies in the past dealt with the complicated interplay of politics and religion, and that of politics and law; how clashes between power and justice and between conflicting principles were perceived, interpreted and negotiated in society; how secularisation was contested and defended; and how clashes and tensions between majority and minority opinion were countered and (eventually, in most cases) resolved. Thus it will provide material for useful comparisons to illuminate the politics of the present.

‘The History that Poland Needs. Ten Debates on Polish Past’, OPUS, no. 2020/37/B/HS3/03906, funded: 363 600 PLN, 2021–2024, Principal Investigator: Dr hab. Adam Kożuchowski. The aim of this project, except for reconstructing the history and dynamics of our selected debates, is to analyze the mechanisms and peculiarities of their functioning: (1) The problem of exceptionality versus typicality of the Polish historical development in general, and particularly in light of its methodological consequences. (2) The so-called Jagiellonian controversy: the consequences and legacies of four hundred years of Polish expansion eastwards, and coexistence with the peoples of today Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, and Latvia.(3) The so-called Piast idea, as a response to the Jagiellonian one, and the expression of the ideas of perennialism and indigeneity. (4) The noble democracy controversy–its exceptionalism, consequences, and assessments. (5) The meaning and consequences of the partitions of Poland-Lithuania. (6) The insurrection controversy, covering all attempts to resist Poland’s mightier neighbors militarily, from the eighteen-century confederation of Bar, up to the anti-communist guerilla of the late 1940s. (7) The debates on collaboration, compromise, and other adaptation and survival strategies in the post-partitions era.(8) The debate on the reasons, nature, and causes of backwardness, addressing both the economic aspects and the peculiarity of the social structure. (9) Counterfactual scenarios as imagined solutions to Poland’s most troubling problems in the past. (10) The victimhood versus national guilt controversy, particularly concerning the post-1939 period.

‘The culture of the amateur programming of home computers in the 1980s in the context of cognitive capitalism’, OPUS, no. 2020/37/B/HS3/03610, funded: 769 889 PLN, 2021–2025, Principal Investigator: Dr Patryk Wasiak. The objective of the project is to deconstruct the practices of the amateur programming of 8-bit home computers in the 1980s as a cultural form. The Principal Investigator envision it as a concrete manifestation of a culture in a specific historical setting. He investigates how such ‘everyday programming’ was imagined, considered and experienced. To do so, he explores how amateur programming was embedded in the specific cultural, economic, and social currents in the highly developed countries of Western Europe and the US, during that decade. This research provides evidence that analysis of amateur software creation, a form of immaterial labor, can significantly contribute to a better understanding of the interconnections between the emergence of cognitive capitalism and the use of computing tools. This historical project aims to contribute to the debates on the role of software and coding skills in societies. Its agenda is to highlight how a historical study can make a timely and socially relevant contribution to the ongoing debates on the issue of the critical role of the technical competences of digital technology users.

‘The Polish socio-political Concepts of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century’, OPUS, no. 2020/39/B/HS3/02475, funded: 476 440 PLN, 2021–2025, Principal Investigator: Dr hab. Adam Kożuchowski. This study investigates the changes of the meaning, and the rhetorical potential of some 50 Polish socio-political concepts of the last two centuries. It is a study in the developments and transformations of the Polish political discourse, viewed through the prism of the key socio-political concepts. Concepts both define and mirror our imagination, and hence the socio-political realities that constitute both its source and its product. Thus, concepts are also carriers of political ideologies, which notoriously compete to monopolize their meanings. The ways we understand ‘nation’ and ‘society,’ ‘party’ and ‘revolution’ change in time, and these changes are in no way innocent: they are products of ideological competition. However, gaining a monopoly for one of the key political concepts is rare and never permanent. In countries like Poland, large segments of political imagination is formed by concepts borrowed from foreign discourses. Is the process of their transfer and adaptation determined by some definable factors, however? What are the moments when new concepts appear in the public discourse in great numbers?

‘Czechoslovak-Polish Scholarly Entanglements in the Cold War Between High Politics and Individual Strategies’, OPUS LAP, no. 2020/39/I/HS3/03589, funded: 1 774 175 PLN, 2021–2024 (extended until 14th June 2025), Principal Investigator: Dr Tomáš W. Pavlíček.  A Polish-Czech research team will investigate Cold War exchanges basing on ego-documents and interviews. By this the team expects to achieve a more delicate and varied pattern of scholarly contacts that would be possible by concentrating on official documents. Research in archives and libraries will allow to describe contexts in which these entanglements happened and pinpoint the ways in which scientists manipulated these contexts to achieve intended results. While this does not directly challenge the research that spoke on predominance of the state in structuring, allowing and limiting international contacts, it does point toward spaces of freedom that could be created – both outside of the official channels, but often also within them.

Project website: https://entanglements.ihpan.edu.pl/

‘The French People in The Inmate Hierarchy of Auschwitz-Birkenau Camp’, PRELUDIUM, no. 2021/41/N/HS3/03594, funded: 139 051 PLN, 2022–2025, Principal Investigator: Paulina Chrząszcz MA. The main purpose of the project is filling in the current research gap and taking a closer look at the phenomenon of hierarchy development in the community of camp inmates deported from France to the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp and its subcamps. It serves the objective of outlining the presence of French prisoners as a separate national entity in the camp, which has not been sufficiently emphasized as far. Special attention will be devoted to the participation of French inmates in resistance movement within the camp, here understood as inmate activity such as: self-help, sabotage, activism for martyrdom commemoration. Nevertheless, it will be important to establish which labour commandos inmates worked in and barracks they used. The final subject of the project is to record assigned duties of French inmates as compared to those held by members of other nationalities (especially Poles).

‘Studies on the Transformation of the Female Youth and Their Everyday Life in Interwar Tarnów’, PRELUDIUM, no. 2021/41/N/HS3/02065, funded: 130 795 PLN, 2022–2025 (extended until 23th January 2025), Principal Investigator: Marcin Wilk MA. The main task of this project will be a reasonably complete and multi-faceted reconstruction of the social and cultural functioning of various classes, groups and social environments of the female youth in interwar Tarnów. The project will also answer these questions: Who were the representatives of the “female youth”? How, as a specific and diverse social group, were they perceived in public space? What were their opportunities for social and individual fulfilment? What were they aspiring to? The additional objective is to develop a method of interpretation and historical analysis which would be adequate for the research on the social role of gender. Although the term “female youth” is well known, it is important to carefully consider whether this type of research can open up new perspectives and fit in with the current of so-called “girlhood studies”. Such a reinterpretation of the term “female youth” would allow us to draw on the traditional currents of Polish historiography, as well as on the achievements and works of educational history researchers.

‘Political relations between Poland and the Holy Roman Empire in the 10th–12th Centuries’, OPUS, no. 2021/43/B/HS3/01099, funded: 237 394 PLN, 2022–2025, Principal Investigator: Professor Zbigniew Dalewski. The project aims at reconsidering the political relations between the Piast monarchy and the Holy Roman Empire in the early and high Middle Ages. The research on that topic has a long tradition going back to the early 19th century. It was, however, carried out on the margins of studies concerning various aspects or events in the history of medieval Poland and has not resulted in any more extensive works presenting Polish-German relations in a broader time framework. The project is going to fulfil that gap and present Polish-German relations between the mid-10th century and the late 12th century.

“Yesterday’s war victims are today’s unemployment victims:” Polish Jewish Women’s Experiences of the Great War and the Economic Downturn in the Interwar Period, PRELUDIUM, no. 2022/45/N/HS3/01014, funded: 154 980 PLN, 2023–2026, Principal Investigator: MA Aleksandra Jakubczak. This project aims to verify and expand the hypothesis that for some women, the absence of men and, for others, men’s inability to support the family financially during the war and the interwar period led to the creation of a bigger space for independence for Jewish women, changes in social mores, gender roles, and intra-family relations. Individual histories of women from the Jewish lower classes will be situated in a broader context of macrostructures that determined the Jewish women’s opportunities and choices. Some of these delineating structures were, e.g., the local economy and Jewish place within it; the legal position of women in the Polish Republic and how their emancipation worked in practice; migratory laws that exposed protectionist attitude towards women, especially in the interwar period. Individual women’s decisions will also be situated in the microstructures in which they functioned – the Jewish community and family (and their attitudes toward women’s gainful employment, emigration, and the independence of women in general). Analyzing how Jewish women responded to the economic and financial challenges they and, their families and Jewish communities faced will allow a better understanding of the transformations in social mores within the Jewish community in the period under study.

‘Socio-political radicalization of the Polish province during the Great Depression and its consequences. The case of Wielkopolska/Greater Poland/ against the comparative background (1929–1939)’, OPUS, no. 2022/45/B/HS3/03408, funded: 1 032 134 PLN, 2023–2026, Principal Investigator: Dr hab. Grzegorz Roman Krzywiec. The aim of the project is to reconstruct and analyze the course of the Great Depression of the 1930s and its impact on the radicalization of attitudes and political practices in the Greater Poland (Wielkopolska) province against the background of processes occurring in other parts of interwar Poland. The Depression is considered as the starting point for a comprehensive revision of capitalism as a socio-economic order with the emergence of two alternative socioeconomic orders; communism and fascism.

‘Imperial commoners of Brazil and West Africa (1640–1822): global history from a correspondence network perspective’, OPUS, no. 2022/45/B/HS3/00473, funded: 1 804 551 PLN, 2023–2027, Principal Investigator: Dr Agata Błoch. The history of Portuguese expansion shows extraordinary conquests, sea voyages and cross-cultural encounters. In the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, Portugal created one of the largest European empires. In the overseas territories, the Iberian colonizers shared space with people of different ethnicities, skin colors, religions, and social status. This pluralism led to complex relationships between people of different social classes both in the metropolis and in the colonies and shaped societies around the world. Examining these relationships and the influence of the common people on the macrohistory/global history of the Portuguese Empire is the central goal of this project.

‘The Discourse of Composite Parliaments in post-Napoleonic Europe: The Belgian and Polish Case, 1815–1848’, OPUS, no. 2022/45/B/HS3/00464, funded: 1 131 248 PLN, 2023–2026, Principal Investigator: Dr Piotr Kuligowski. The project seeks to explore how the language of parliamentarism may evolve in a situation of revolutionary fluctuations and numerous structural breaks and discontinuities, focusing on the example of the parliamentary discourses of Belgium and Poland in the post-Napoleonic era, i.e. in the years 1815–1848.

„Religion, Rationalism and Enlightenment: exploring documents on Polish-Dutch connections”, OPUS, no. 2023/49/B/HS1/02719, funded: 848 000 PLN, 2024–2026, Principal Investigator: Dr hab. Jan Waszink. This project will restore and make accessible a set of fascinating sources on two early-modern minority religions that operated between Poland and the Netherlands in the 17th century: Polish Socinians and Dutch Remonstrants or Arminians. As a result of their shared history, Dutch archives contain several important documents on the Polish Socinians. This project will lay the groundwork for a future project on the role of these groups in the rise of the culture of rationalism in the Enlightenment.

‘“The barren fencing of nationalisms”: methodological shift in Silesian historiography in the middle of the 20th century’, PRELUDIUM, no. 2023/49/N/HS3/02383, funded: 88 779 PLN, 2024–2026, Principal Investigator: Oleksandr Pestrykov MA. The goal of this research project is to investigate the shifts in ideology and methodology in historical studies of Silesian history by Polish, Czech, and German scholarsin the middle of the 20th century.  The research will analyze and compare the output of these three historiographies and delve into the institutional and ideological pressures influencing historians. Given the changing ownership of the Silesian region historically, interpretations of its history by German, Czechoslovakian, and Polish historians have varied. In the aftermath of both World Wars, historians studying the region predominantly followed a nationalist or statist paradigm, which was largely abandoned by the early 1950s. The former approach had critiqued as the “fencing of nationalisms,” and this interesting metaphor provides the project’s title.

„Critical Contexts of Old Maps Interpretation. Towards Systematisation of Methodology”, MINIATURA, no. 2024/08/X/HS3/00320, funded: 49 321 PLN, 2024–2025, Principal Investigator: Dr Katarzyna Słomska-Przech. The main research interest is to investigate how the process of map interpretation is described in academic texts (papers and books). The aims at this stage of preparations for a future wider-scale project, would be to 1) refine the data collection procedure, and 2) establish the preliminary list of contexts that may influence the old map interpretation process (with a focus on a comparative perspective for history and geography).

‘Monstrous Rivers: Investigating the Environmental History of Modern European Floods through Literary Sources‘, OPUS, no. 2023/49/B/HS3/04329, funded: 324 685 PLN, 2024–2028, Principal Investigator: Dr hab. Anna Barcz. The research project aims to explore the shifting role of hydroengineering in modern European history, specifically its correlation with river flood events between the 18th and 20th centuries. It investigates the ecological limitations of hydraulic transformations in flood control and mitigation history and their impact on river ecosystems, as well as the growing emphasis on environmentally-conscious approaches to hydroengineering. By asking a thought-provoking question ‘What stories do rivers tell when they flood and what stories do humans believe in they tell?’ it seeks to reestablish the significance of elemental rivers in environmental history by analysing literary sources on historical flood events.

The research questions focus on interpreting the environmental history as a story of spatial negotiation between humans and flooding rivers, uncovering overlooked historical information and warning signs through literature, and reconstructing a comprehensive historiography that includes rivers as powerful, monstrous and enchanted entities. The project justifies its importance by highlighting the rising occurrence of always surprising ‘millennium’ or ‘unprecedented’ floods and the need for looking at the historical data to learn how in the past cultural adaptation to environmental hazards was expressed and what would historical rivers communicate to us for safer future.

During four years of study, the team consisting of a literary scholar, historian and geographer will focus on three iconic rivers for understanding modern Europe: the Danube, Thames, and Rhine. In contrast to many rivers in Poland, these rivers are among the most transformed and obstructed rivers in Europe and prone to disastrous flooding, including the floods of the Danube in 1838/1926, Thames in 1928, and Rhine in 1995. The research results will be disseminated predominantly in English in a form of international conference papers and publications. Not only theories will be used to map the interplay between humans, hydroengineering practices, and river systems, but also in a series of critical maps, we aim to show what kind of warning signs flooding rivers transmit to us. At the website of Tadeusz Manteuffel’s Institute of History we will publish all open access materials and selected bibliography for future studies on flood histories. By this study, we aim to contribute to a deeper understanding of the historical context and perspectives regarding the management of rivers and the ecological impact of hydroengineering projects in modern Europe.

,,Jewish doctors in Poland – database – as of August 1939”, MINIATURA, no. 2024/08/X/HS3/00755, funded: 26 153 PLN, 2024–2025, Principal Investigator: Dr Jolanta Epsztein.  The aim of this project is to collect information about the community of Jewish doctors in Poland on the eve of the outbreak of World War II. Research will be conducted not only to identify as many practicing Jewish physicians as possible, but also to gather information as religion, place of birth, name and profession of the father, studies, date of receiving the diploma, nostrification of the diploma, place of work, specialization, activity in social and political organizations, date and circumstances of death. In the case of Holocaust survivors, also information about their fate during and after the war (workplace, migration). Gathered data will also enable analysis of the scale, role and participation of women doctors in the development of medical science.

„Scientific inquiry in Berlin regarding the management of state domains in West Prussia in 1772–1872”, MINIATURA, no. 2024/08/X/HS3/00841, funded: 28 565 PLN, 2024–2025, Principal Investigator: Dr Janusz Dargacz. The result of this project will be the examination of extracts from archival materials and literature on the subject, which will be used to prepare a scientific text on the structure and activities of state domains in West Prussia in the years 1772–1872, their location, transformations, staffing, scope of activities, etc.

„Towns’ villages. Landholdings of towns and burghers in late medieval and early modern Greater Poland in a Central European context”, MINIATURA, no. 2024/08/X/HS3/00993, funded: 30 384 PLN, 2024–2025, Principal Investigator: Dr Michał Słomski. An extensive bibliographic database resulting from problems arising from urban villages in pre-partition Poland and in the countries of Central Europe in the Middle Ages and in the modern era will be the result of the library query. The preliminary identification of sources based on archival research will allow the exclusion of possibilities and extensions resulting from research on urban villages in former Poland in the Greater Poland region.

„The Fate of Socinian Archives: A Comparative Study of Collections in Cluj and the Netherlands”, MINIATURA, no. 2024/08/X/HS3/01791, funded: 25 274 PLN, 2024–2025, Principal Investigator: Dr Anna Laskowska. This research project aims to investigate the crucial preserved Socinian archives, housed in two separate places: Cluj-Napoca (or Kolozsvár, currently in Romania) and in the Netherlands; these archives are associated with the Hungarian Unitarian Church and the Remonstrants, respectively. Despite the significance of these collections, the histories of them, including how they ended up in their current locations, who collected and preserved them, and the motivations behind their preservation, remain unexplored. By tracing the provenance and sociocultural contexts of these archives, this project seeks to uncover the intricate networks and sociopolitical dynamics that shaped their trajectories.

„Women experts and feminist knowledge production in post-war East Central Europe (1945–1989)”, OPUS LAP, no. 2023/51/I/HS3/02044, funded: 2 024 161 PLN, 2025–2028, Principal Investigator: Dr hab. Natalia Jarska. The project aims to build on and link four strands of recent historiography on post-war East Central Europe: the history of feminism and women’s organizations, the history of gender in expertise, the history of transnational scientific and expert relationships during the Cold War, and the history of women in science and expertise, so far prominently understudied. Preliminary research has indicated a significant potential in systematic comparative and transnational research that tackles the relationship between a growing number of women scientists and experts, the specific context for women’s activism under state socialism, scholarly exchange and transfer, and feminist knowledge production. The project will offer a new perspective on the history of feminist thinking and gender equality advocacy in post-war East Central Europe. It fills a notable gap in women’s history and the history of expertise in the region. It will significantly contribute to comparative and transnational studies of the region. Furthermore, it aims to build a comprehensive approach to the history of expertise by putting expert discourses, the careers of their authors, and activism together. The project will address expertise of problems crucial for women’s lives under state socialism (and beyond): labor, household management, power relations in the family, and health.

„Non-Ukrainians in Revolutionary Ukraine, 1917–1921: (Trans-)National Agency in the Struggle for Emancipation and Survival”, OPUS LAP, no. 2023/51/I/HS3/01272, funded: 1 537 198 PLN, 2025–2029, Principal Investigator: Doc. Dr hab. Gennadii Korolov. The project aims to re-examine one of the most crucial periods of modern Ukrainian history – the revolutionary transformation of 1917–1921 – by synthesizing the diverse experiences of the non-Ukrainian population living in Ukraine. While the existing historiography of the revolution in Ukraine has focused primarily on the state-building efforts of Ukrainian national elites, the lives and activities of non-Ukrainians have been largely overlooked. Yet, Ukraine was a multicultural space in which linguistically and confessionally heterogeneous people lived side by side. No sincere history of revolutionary Ukraine can be written without incorporating the non-Ukrainians into the narrative. Analyzing the political, cultural, and socio-economic agency of non-Ukrainians in Ukraine from a transnational perspective is at the core of this project. The study will focus primarily on Poles, Jews, and Russians, the most numerically and historically relevant nationalities, but will also examine Germans, Greeks, Belarussians, Czechs, and Moldovans. The project’s research questions are structured in five larger thematic clusters: the analysis of in-group transformations among non-Ukrainians, non-Ukrainians’ interactions with state authorities, non-Ukrainians’ external relations with co-nationals outside Ukraine, the interactions among non-Ukrainian groupings themselves, and the ways in which non-Ukrainians have experienced violence. The methodological approach has been conceptualized in studies of transnational and entangled history slants, which allows us to explore intergroup and transnational interactions between Ukrainians and non-Ukrainians.

„Urban communities in East-Central Europe (ca. 1850–1914)”, OPUS, no. 2024/53/B/HS3/03990, funded: 1 366 460 PLN, 2025–2028, Principal Investigator: Dr hab. Aleksander Łupienko. The project is aimed at analysing urban society in all the three partitions of the Polish lands during the nineteenth century, between the ‘Spring of Nations’ and the outbreak of the World War One (1848–1914). It will look at the inner workings of the urban communities, into which the society was then divided. These communities included the ethnic, estate-based, religious and confessional, professional and class-related, local and neighbourhood groups, as well as more modern voluntary associations, established during this period. It will argue that the allegedly premodern community is a category that should be employed more widely not only on the studies of the Middle Ages and Early Modern times, but also the industrial society of the nineteenth century. The towns and cities to be researched will include larger and smaller urban centres: Warsaw and Łódź in the Russian, Lviv and Kolomiya in the Austrian, and Poznań and Toruń in the German partition. The research will delve into the inner workings of these communities, the activity and narrations produced by their leaders (the official ones and those who acted only incidentally as the groups’ leaders), places deemed as important for these groupings (historical sites, commemorative places, monuments, or simply houses or specific parts of the cities), and lastly to the visions of the shared past that were produced and that were often unidentical with the visions showcased in more mainstream and celebrated books or commemoration practices.

„Rus Chronicles as source of common law”, OPUS, no. 2025/57/B/HS3/02198, fundedi: 2 176 432 PLN, 2026–2030, Principal Investigator: Professor Adrian Jusupović. The main goal of the project is to study a Rus common law (precedential norms) and customs information preserved in Rus chronicles/letopis’) from the 10th to 13th centuries in comparative perspective (and the use of these legal precedents in later documents from the territory of Rus’ – that is, present-day Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania and Poland). The existing research has, on the one hand, failed to display an innovative scientific approach to interrogating these sources and, on the other hand, incorporated only a fraction of the information available concerning the law and customs of the Rus territory. Most researchers have instead concentrated their research on strictly defined legal texts (eg. Rus Truth=Russkaya Pravda), while ignoring to some extent narrative sources. Taking this into account, our research will unlock a whole new field of research.

To contribute to more rigorous scholarship in this field, we will begin by preparing a database using the published editions of Cyrillic chronicles alongside Latin, Scandinavian, and Greek sources as comparators. We will examine these editions in search of information about law and customs, including, for example, international, civil, property, and religious law. These passages will subsequently be translated into English to make them more accessible to the international community.

This research has three key objectives:

• A finalized, open-access LawRus database (digital source edition) or digital repository of legal historical sources in a Mediawiki format, created in cooperation with IT specialists from the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IH PAS). The long-term preservation of this database on a IH PAS server is another key objective. The database shall be made available for contributions from interested researchers at the end of the project funding period, but it will be available as a work-in-progress from the first year onwards.
• An international conference in 2028, bringing together specialists on Slavic law (and customs) to encourage more research on the legal history of the Middle Ages as part of the project’s wider engagement.
• Publication. Articles in English and other languages in renowned European journals. We plan to publish our case studies on law and customs. We do not exclude, in fact we consider it quite likely that this project will result in more than one book publication.

The team, due to the planned research, will be interdisciplinary. Historians will do a large part of the work, but the contributions of lawyers and philologists will also be invaluable. All team members will have a philological background (with experience of working with Cyrillic, Latin, Byzantine and Scandinavian sources). Some of the team have unique skills in reading manuscripts from the medieval and modern periods. At least four members of the pre-selected team (including the PI) have editorial experience (they have published mainly Cyrillic sources, some in prestigious series such as Monumenta Poloniae Historica). These skills are crucial for the preparation of proper historical as well as legal interpretations (in particular for correct reading comprehension).

To achieve its proposed objectives, LawRus project requires an interdisciplinary research framework that combines methods and tools from Literary Studies, Historical studies, Cultural Memory Studies, Ecclesiastical History, Law studies, and other fields. In accordance with the presented research proposal, historians will meticulous analyse the available written sources in search of any mention of the law and customs, using all available research methods in order to obtain the best possible results from the project.