This book is a study of the construction of early modern identities in one historically and politically distinct province in the Germanic-Slavonic borderlands: Royal or Polish Prussia, which from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century was part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and possessed great strategic and economic importance due to its location on the Baltic Sea. Recent local initiatives in today's Poland to revive a specifically ‘Prussian’ patriotism in this region, including the voievodships of Pomerania, the region around the Mazurian lakes, and the old Hanseatic cities of Gdańsk, Toruń and Elbląg, have not only attracted tourism, particularly from Germany. They have also thrown down the gauntlet to almost fifty years of denial by communist governments of the fact that Poland's historical borders included a large number of non-Polish inhabitants whose composition bore no resemblance to the country's present, artificially created national, linguistic and religious homogeneity.

The loss of this diversity of cultures, languages and nations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries creates problems for the historian with regard to the recording of place and personal names. In the contemporary sources, within one and the same document, or even on the same page, German, Polish and Latin versions for the same town, territory, country, office or person appear without rules or regularity. Despite the best intentions of creating clarity for the present-day reader, compromises have to be made.