Synthesis of Polish historiography of the Romantic era according to Andrzej Wierzbicki. Reconstruction of the synthesis model

Abstract

In the text, I attempted to reconstruct the “model of the synthesis of the historiography of the Romantic era”, constructed by Andrzej Wierzbicki in his publication Historiografia polska doby romantyzmu [Polish Historiography of the Romantic Era]. The historiographic context of this book was the tradition of approaching the history of nineteenth-century historiography and Wierzbicki’s experience in dealing with the problems of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century historiography. When reconstructing his original model of synthesis, I took into account the way of approaching the “historiography of good Romanticism”, both as a synthetic approach and as an original conceptualisation of the tasks and challenges faced by a historian of historiography in the late 1990s. The reconstruction of the model was carried out in four steps: 1) determining the state of research and the role of historiography; 2) analysis of Wierzbicki’s reflections on the subject of the synthesis; 3) analysis of Wierzbicki’s reflections on the chronological framework; 4) analysis of the synthesis axis and its compositional system. The conclusion contains arguments for the innovative nature of the synthesis of Romantic historiography and its inspiring character for later works created in the field of the historiography of Romanticism.