The Cultural and Religious Politics of Polish Romanticism: European Dimensions of Nineteenth-Century Polish Nationhood

Abstract

“The Cultural and Religious Politics of Polish Romanticism: European Dimensions of Nineteenth-century Polish Nationhood” provides a transnational history of nineteenth-century Polish nationalism, religion, and politics. Focusing on several generations of writers, intellectuals and politicians born in Poland between roughly 1795 and 1815, many of whom belonged to the Romantic movement in literature, this dissertation recovers submerged but central strands of political and religious thought, demonstrating that Polish Romantic nationalists’ visions of Poland were inspired by Islam, Judaism, Orthodoxy, and Protestantism, as well as Catholicism. While most scholars have credited the Polish Romantics with laying the groundwork for contemporary Polish national Catholicism, this project argues that the Polish Romantic generations only rarely conflated Polish national identity with Catholicism, but developed their politics from their understanding of Polish’s historic religious pluralism.