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“Unfinished work and damaged materials”: historians and the Scots in late medieval and early modern Poland – Dr David Worthington, UHI Centre for History |
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| Thanks to Dr. David Worthington for this audio presentation of the fruits of some of his research in Eastern Europe. The mp3 file is downloadable at the bottom of the page. | ||
| “A report on unfinished work and damaged materials”: so begins the title of a 1947 document prepared by a Polish historian, Waclaw Borowy (1890-1950) amid the rubble of Warsaw. The report in question reflects on the abandonment, towards the very end of World War Two, of what would have been the first full length historical study of British-Polish historical relations. This was a manuscript which, had it been published, would possibly have marked the biggest single breakthrough to that point both in our understanding of those Scots who emigrated to Poland in late medieval and early modern times, and perhaps even in the study of Scottish emigration more generally during that period. |
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| For current scholars, whether writing in German, Polish, or English, a better chance than ever before surely exists now to further the “unfinished work”, as well as to repair some of the “damaged materials” referred to in Borowy’s moving account and which are detectable also in many of the other historical works referred to in this talk. Over the centuries, the relative vividness of collective memory as regards the Scottish-Polish connection amongst Prussians and Poles has been striking, despite (or perhaps because of) Poland’s frequently posited presence in Europe as partitioned, dissolved then resurrected state, to Nazi-occupied zone, through Communism, Solidarity, the eventual joining of the European Union and the subsequent migration westwards of a further wave comprising many hundreds of thousands of the country’s most gifted young people. That memory has not been so obvious, at least until recently, within Scotland and in the rest of the English-speaking world. |
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Dr. David WorthingtonDr. David Worthington
