Peter Paul Dobek, "The Public House in Central Europe: Inns, Tavern, and Alehouses in Cracow during the Jagiellonian Dynasty" (Lexington Books, 2024)

So would you tell me about how you were drawn to this project and social history in general?

Yeah, absolutely.

So yeah, it's definitely a social history, but it goes well beyond that because these places, these public houses encompass everything, right? You've got politics, you've got economics, you've got culture, you've got all these things going on.

And so it is a history that goes beyond that social aspect.

But it is definitely looking at the nitty gritty, the everyday, what is going on in these wonderful places? Who's there? What are they doing? What are they eating? What are they drinking? All of these different things fall into this one little place.

And that's why it's so important.

It's just essential to life in the Middle Ages for pretty much any city you talk about, especially for Krakow at this time.

And so it is very much just kind of a center that is vital to any place really throughout Europe.

And the way I came to it was luck.

I really just stumbled on to this topic.

I had gone to the archives in Warsaw thinking that I would focus on the Piast dynasty, which is an earlier dynasty in Polish history, but I realized that the documents really are supportive more to studies on the Jagiellonian dynasty.

which is from 1385 to 1572.

And so looking at these documents, I kept coming across all these different buildings, mills, taverns, inns.

And when I spoke to the different professors who were in Warsaw, they're like, yeah, no one's done this history before.

And I was like, no way.

Like, there's no way that no one has not looked at these public houses.

And sure enough, there just is minimal literature.

And so I was like, okay, this is definitely my topic.

This is going to be my love interest for the next seven years.

And that's how it worked out.

And I got to really just dive into this topic and explore it fully.