Polish residents on the move — people and things in the 16th–18th centuries

Abstract

The article attempts to identify the things necessary for the creation of the so-called environmental bubble — a space protecting the travelling nobility of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from the discomfort resulting from a confrontation with a foreign reality. An attempt was also made to determine what “travel items” say about their owners from the point of view of a cultural historian, in comparison with findings from the sociology of things and the anthropological concept of the “world of things.” These issues were discussed using selected examples of educational journeys of magnates, a courtier, and students in the 16th–18th centuries. The basis for the study were diaries of such trips, parental instructions, correspondence, and sources not yet used in studies on the history of such trips, such as wills, probate inventories, and inventories of movable property collected in magnates’ treasuries.