In January 1663 the former alderman of the Groningen tailors’ guild, Gerard Udinck, was sentenced to death for his role in orchestrating a series of riots in the city. On the day of his execution, however, Udinck received a pardon in the form of a lifelong banishment. Although initially relieved to be alive, Udinck’s experiences in exile would prove taxing in a variety of ways. He spent the next three years in northwestern Germany, first in Steinfurt and then in Neuenhaus, where he recorded his daily life in a diary. Many of these entries describe a life that was shaped by disparaging gossip, threats of violence, physical assaults, a devastating plague epidemic, the loss of powerful patrons, and financial hardships. In the autumn of 1665 a massive army of mercenaries from Münster, some 20,000 strong, began advancing on the eastern provinces of the Dutch Republic. Fearing for his life and his property, Udinck made the fateful decision to flee back to the Dutch Republic. Soon after, he was arrested by the Groningen authorities, who accused him of conspiring with the Münster army, and subsequently sentenced him to death. The story that follows explores Udinck’s banishment, exile, and execution using a microhistorical approach. As a microhistory, this dissertation is primarily concerned with the juxtaposition between Udinck’s agency or free will and the broader constraints of seventeenth- century European society. It argues that Udinck’s arrest in 1665 was not simply the result of his possible collusion, stubbornness or naivety, but instead was informed by significant external events, such as the consolidation and monopolization of power in Groningen’s municipal government, as well as an acute sense of panic caused by the military invasion from Münster. Recognizing that diaries, and other egodocuments, can serve as important counterweights to more formal sources, this dissertation examines Udinck’s story through the lens of his diary entries. Furthermore, these are read against a number of other contemporary sources including trial records, interrogators’ notes, pamphlets, and various accounts of the seventeenth-century Dutch historian, Lieuwe van Aitzema. As such, Udinck’s diary provides a unique glimpse into the life of a man who was under enormous social pressure and heavily critical of the political leaders attempting to profit from his downfall. Udinck criticized these men in his diary entries, in letters, and in conversations in taverns and homes. For the Groningen authorities, Udinck’s words were subversive and threatening to the social order. And with an enemy army literally outside the gates, the leaders of Groningen would not entertain the idea of a second pardon.

The Diploma thesis deals with the phenomenon of travelling of women in Bohemia in the second half of the nineteenth century. It concentrates on the middle class women, who at this time started to travel. The practical part of the thesis sets a typology of journeys and final destinations. The typology is based on a wide range of primary sources, among others on women diaries, memoirs, articles concerning travelling in fashion magazines and in magazine Ženské listy as well as on relevant documents of the literary society Svatobor archive. The thesis focuses particularly on travelling resulting from the women new occupational needs reflecting thus a growing women emancipation movement in Bohemia and changes in social status of women in Bohemia in given period. The thesis also analyses the course of everyday life of women's travelling and provides an overview of possible sources of information and literature for women who at that time intended to travel.

Письма писателя являются важнейшим материалом для изучения его биографии и творчества, раскрывают культурно-исторический контекст создания произведений, могут играть ключевую роль в определении авторской интенции, концепции и стратегии. В работе предложена классификация и общая характеристика эпистолярного наследия Мамина-Сибиряка. Отмечен круг эпистолярного общения писателя и его основные группы, включающие членов семьи, друзей, редакторов литературных журналов и т.д. Рассмотрены практики публикации писем Мамина-Сибиряка, намечен примерный объем ранее не публиковавшихся писем. / The writer's letters are important material for studying his biography and his works; they unveil the cultural-historical context of the literary works creation and can be essential to define the author's intention, conception and strategy. The following work offers classification and general characteristic of the Mamin-Sibiryak's epistolary heritage. We registered the writer's epistolary circle and its main groups that include members of the family, friends, literature magazines' editors etc. We also identified the publishing background of Mamin-Sibiryak's letters and outlined the amount of letters that have not been published before.

The main goal of this diploma thesis was to introduce the personality of Kryštof Popel younger of Lobkowicz (1549−1609) based on his diaries, which came from the years 1602−1604. The edition of these diaries completes the whole thesis. Topics of the chapters are based on notes by Kryštof - they inform us about Lobkowicz's private and public life, and also about his patronage. The presented text also allows the reader to look into everyday life of the nobility, which took place in Prague palaces at the beginning of the seventeenth century.

This thesis questions a series of assumptions concerning the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century modernization of European spaces. Current scholarship tends to concur with essayistic texts and images by contemporary intellectuals that technological and organizational developments increased the freedom of movement of those living in western-European societies, while at the same time alienating them from each other and from their environment. I assess this claim with the help of Dutch travel egodocuments such as travel diaries and letters. After a prosopographical investigation of all available northern-Netherlandish travel egodocuments created between 1500 and 1915, a selection of these documents is examined in greater detail. In these documents, travellers regarded the possession of identity documents, a correct appearance, and a fitting social identity along with their personal contacts, physical capabilities, and the weather as the most important factors influencing whether they managed to gain access to places. A discussion of these factors demonstrates that no linear increase, nor a decrease, occurred in the spatial power felt by travellers. The exclusion many travellers continued to experience was often overdetermined. The largest groups affected by this were women and less educated families. Yet travellers could also play out different access factors against each other. By paying attention to how practices matched hopes and expectations, it is possible to discover how gravely social inequities were really felt by travellers. Perhaps surprisingly, all social groups desired to visit the same types of places. Their main difference concerned the atmosphere of the places where the different groups felt at home. To a large degree this matched travellers' unequal opportunities. Therefore, although opportunities remained strongly unequal throughout the period, this was not always experienced as a problem. Also, in cases where it was, many travellers knew strategies to work around the obstacles created for them.