The eminent French historian Fernand Barudel pointed out in his works about the Med that one would need for understanding of activites of an individual a wide context created by the social space and environment in which the main hero tends to live in. For Braudel became Philippe 2nd only a pretence to analyse the whole civilisation of the Medin his times. This context can be employed on the man of letters, a loner, spending the most of his life in his astronomical observatory – Nicolaus Copernicus. Unquestionably, the social environment of Thorn exerted the biggest influence on the formation of the young Copernicus. The city was located on the lower Vistula, on the boarder of the state of Teutonic Knights and Poland, with strong relationships with Silesia, Cracow and Hansa and over Hansa with Northern Europe. This location created extraordinary circumstances for the formation of the one of the biggest intellects of his times. This cultural mosaic was the native environment of Nicolaus Copernicus, a German- speaking Pole, on the maternal side a descendant of immigrants from Westphalia, on the paternal side of Silesian Copernicus-family with Slavic roots, from his birth to his death the faithful subject of the Polish kings.

The Thornische Nachrichten von gelehrten Sachen, published in Toruń in 1762–1766, was a learned review journal, the first periodical of this kind in Poland. As one of its editors' priorities was to keep track of current Polish writing, the magazine regularly published reviews of the most notable books of Polish Enlightenment (among its reviewers were Stanisław Konarski, Wacław Rzewuski, Franciszek Bohomolec, Józef Minasowicz).