Enlightenment and Holiday Reform in East-Central Europe

In the eighteenth century, Catholic populations in Europe as well as in other parts of the world were confronted with a wave of radical holiday reforms. At the request of secular rulers, popes exempted the people from the obligation to refrain from all field and manual labour for a series of saints' days and Marian days. Religious reform ideals and political economy interacted in these attempts to initiate an "industrious revolution" from above. These historical processes are the subject of a project whose current aim is to contribute to the international research platform "Entangled History of Poland" (funded by the Jagiellonian University in Krakow and the Centre for Polish-Lithuanian Studies at the University of Aberdeen), which has been running since 2022. In the context of his affiliation with this research group, Kilian Harrer deals with both implemented and failed plans of holiday reform in Poland-Lithuania, where the problem of unfree labour (corvée for landlords) played a particularly important role. Furthermore, he is interested in the option of expanding the area of investigation and looking at analogous reforms in Protestant as well as Catholic Silesia.