On 17 October 2019, the Chairholder of the European Civilization Chair, Professor Richard BUTTERWICK-PAWLIKOWSKI, spoke on ‘Specyfika Oświecenia w Polsce na tle europejskim’ [The specificity of the Enlightenment in Poland against the European background] at the University of Warsaw. This was part of the conference Specyfika polskiego Oświecenia [the specificity of the Polish Enlightenement], jointly organized by the Faculty of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Warsaw and the periodical Teologia Polityczna.
Professor BUTTERWICK-PAWLIKOWSKI underlined the essentiality of ‘enlightened Catholicism’ and ‘Catholic Enlightenment’ to the process of Enlightenment in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but argued that these phenomena were by no means specific to Poland; on the contrary; overlaps between Enlightenment and religion were the norm across the Euro-Atlantic world. It was rather the exceptionally anti-religious radical Enlightenment in France that needed further explanation. What made the Enlightenment in Poland specific, argued the Chairholder, were the constitutional and geopolitical conditions in the eighteenth-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
On 25 October 2019, Professor BUTTERWICK-PAWLIKOWSKI reviewed volumes 50 and 51 of the Polski Słownik Biograficzny [Polish Biographical Dictionary], published between 2014 and 2017, at the periodic meeting of the Scientific Council of the PSB. The meeting was held at the headquarters of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences in Kraków. The PSB, founded in 1935, is one of the world’s most rigorous and respected national biographical dictionaries.
On 3-4 October and 10 October 2019, Professor BUTTERWICK-PAWLIKOWSKI participated in conferences organized by the Royal Łazienki Museum and the Museum of the Palace of King John III at Wilanów respectively. They were devoted to the artistic patronage and politics of two families which once owned the ‘Pheasantry’ renamed Natolin in the early nineteenth century: the Wettin dynasty – electors of Saxony, kings of Poland and grand dukes of Lithuania – and the Sobieski family, of whom King John III of Poland established the estate in 1677.