Claude Carloman de Rulhière was a French diplomat and writer who was sent to Russia in 1762 as a secretary to the French ambassador. During his stay in St. Petersburg, he eye-witnessed the coup d’état staged by the future Catherine II to dethrone Peter III and to seize the imperial power. Upon his return to Paris, Rulhière publicized his testimony of the event. It soon became notorious and provoked controversy, splitting French elites into supporters and detractors of Catherine II. The agents of the empress attempted to persuade him not to divulge his text, but Rulhière did not succumb to their financial offers and resolved to reveal the truth.

The article integrates the 18th century vampire discourse with problems and approaches of postcolonial studies on the one hand, and with the Galicia research in historical and cultural studies on the other hand. For this purpose, vampirism and postcolonial studies are defined at first, while the change of the vampirism discourse – passing from the revenant image to the one of bloodsucker – is analysed in the next step. Finally it is shown how the vampire’s character and discourse have been adjusted and narratively transformed in 18th-century travel literature on Galicia

The paper discusses conditions of proper communication between the doctor and the patient focusing on the Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Passions (1711) by Bernard Mandeville. The method of treating hypochondria, based mainly on dialogue, presented in this work allows the doctor to correctly recognize disease and to awaken self-knowledge in the patient. Combining hypochondria with stomach problems, expanding the field of factors influencing the development of this disease proves that Mandeville interprets man holistically in the treatment process, and his preferred method focuses more on psychological rather than physical problems. Philopirio, as a representative of Mandeville’s medical views, assumes the role of a medical advisor, whose main task is physical and constant contact with the patient. The Philopirio’s method of treatment becomes effective thanks to medical virtues, especially diligence and empathy. Mandeville’s work unambiguously proves that in the process of diagnosis and convalescence communication between the doctor and the patient has an important role, and sometimes it is essential in the process of curing the patient.

In this article, the imperial idea and civilising missions in the Habsburg Monarchy, mainly of the nineteenth century, are refracted through the prism of the legacy of enlightened absolutism. The article tries to dispel mythologies about its demise around 1800, and about those who could subscribe to its programme throughout the nineteenth century. It questions templates of national history writing which too unanimously connect the Enlightenment to the origins of the various national revivals of the early nineteenth century, and discusses concrete examples of enlightened absolutism’s civilising impulses, among them law, Roman imperial patriotism, and the Catholic religion.

In these remarks I recall the attempts of pointing out the relations between philosophy and modernity in sciences in three distinctively differing point of view, that is the achievements of “the Enlightened Age” (in the sense of Ernst Cassirer), phenomenological philosophy (in the sense of Edmund Husserl) and the classicist conservatism (in the sense of Allan Bloom). In each of these cases an importance of those relations is being acknowledged. However it is not just differently evaluated and justified, but also the diagnoses and forecasts related to it look differently either.

In the last phase of Franciszek Karpiński's life as a writer (the first quarter of the 19th century), he practically gave up poetry and concentrated instead on writing memoirs. This article tries to find out to what extent his autobiographical work, especially his Historia mego wieku i ludzi, z którymi żyłem [A History of My Century and the People with Whom I Lived], is influenced by an attitude characteristic of the sentimentalism of the previous century. As this analysis shows Karpiński's narrative exhibits both a sensitivity much indebted to Rousseau's autobiographical method and skilful shifts of tone, from satire and irony to various shades of melancholy. For sentimentalist aesthetic and poetics the continual manipulation of tone is a means of alerting the reader to the world's complexity. As in the novels of Lawrence Sterne, that complexity is experienced by way of careful observation of fragments of reality, defined by the subjectivity of the observer and the truth of his emotions.

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).

The article is an attempt to outline the theoretical and methodological reflection on public history in the context of some conceptual models and concrete examples of case studies. Considering discursive situations, suppositions, suggestions and interpellations on the enlightenment postulate with regard to public history (including the issues: magistra vitae, emancipatory project, affirmative history, emotive revolution, critical discourse in the public space, modus art based research) I deal with the issues: what is actually the content of public history: history or memory? Does the enlightenment postulate with regard to public history turn memory into history? Are we dealing with some project concocted by the intelligentsia and scientific elite? What are the current trends in the implementation of critical discourse in public history?

This article takes a look at the development women’s press in the first half of the 19th century. A comparison of the press market in the Romantic Age in France, Poland and the United States shows that usually women were eager to take up journalism as a sideline to their literary careers. The article discusses the journalistic work of three women writers — Delphine de Girardin, Wanda Malecka and Margaret Fuller. While each of them was inspired by Romantic and Preromantic writers, their journalism was for the most part a continuation of the Enlightenment models of journalism.