Od prawa kościelnego do historii prawa. Powikłane powojenne losy Profesora Leszka Winowskiego
From Church law to history of law: The complicated postwar life of Professor Leszek Winowski

Summary/Abstract: The paper presents the postwar fate of Professor Leszek Winowski, a pre-war research and teaching assistant at the Chair of Church Law at John Casimir University in Lviv, who after World War II took up employment with the Faculty of Law of the University of Wrocław. His His work for the Faculty in Wrocław was greatly affected by the negative attitude of the communist authorities already from the beginning. For ideological reasons, the authorities were ill-disposed toward the pre-war academic staff. In the case of L. Winowski, what also played a role was his field of research (Church law), which was not recognized by the communist authorities, his additional employment at the Catholic University of Lublin and his different affiliations with the Catholic Church. As a consequence, he had to be hired at the Chair of the History of Law in Western Europe (later the Department of General History of State and Law), trying to harmonize his former interests with the research done at the department in which he was employed. As a result, he focused his research interests on the relations between the Church in Silesia and the rest of the Polish Church, as well as on the Church policy of the Prussian authorities. Another research area in which he published broadly concerned the attitude of the Church and its teachings towards non-believers in the Middle Ages, and consequently also Islamic law, where he became an unquestionable authority in Poland. The postwar life of Professor L. Winowski in Wrocław reflects the State’s policy towards the Church in the period of Polish People’s Republic, also bearing testimony to the research policy pursued at the time.

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