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The Boundaries of the Noble Estate in Walerian Nekanda Trepka’s Liber Chamorum
Abstract
This article is devoted to the perception of estate boundaries and the opportunities for advancement to the nobility in the Polish Republic in the first half of the 17th century, based on Walerian Nekanda Trepka’s Liber chamorum. The principal research aims of the article involve establishing from which social and professional groups the persons seeking to illegally obtain nobility may have originated, and to what extent the nobility’s fears of those groups were justified. A comparison is drawn between Trepka’s introduction to the Liber and the life stories of individual people and families recorded in the main part of the book. Court servants, especially clerks and estate tenants were the largest group of those striving for social promotion. Apparently, somewhat less popular methods of social advancement were marrying a noblewoman, employment in chancelleries, legal professions, and military service. This text also deals with unpopular paths of advancement, such as bringing trials concerning noble status and document forgery. The article partially succeeds in reconstructing the paths of social and class advancement.
Keywords:
Trepka, Liber Chamorum, nobility, social advancementDetails
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
