ABSTRACT
One of the most outstanding figures of nineteenth-century Poland, Antoni Zygmunt Helcel (Hölzel, Hoelzel, Hoeltzel) von Sternstein (Szternsztyn) helped to establish the study of the history of Polish law as an academic discipline. He also laid the foundations of the Kraków historical school, a historiographical orientation that found many adherents in both academia and politics of late nineteenth-century Galicia, among them Józef Szujski and Michał Bobrzyński. Although the source material published by Helcel in Starodawne prawa polskiego pomniki (Ancient sources of old Polish law) has since bee4n subject to emendations and critical reediting, this monumental collection remains a fine example of legal historicism in practice and a landmark of Polish legal history. Antoni Helcel was a prominent member of the Kraków Academic Society, which played a crucial role in developing Kraków’s scientific potential. As a politician and activist, Helcel laid the foundations for the Kraków and Galician conservatism, a mindset and an ideology that became very influential in the Polish lands ruled by Austria in the second half of nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries.
