Maria Dembińska

Maria Anna Zofia Dembińska (née Gołuchowska; 21 February 1916 – 1 November 1996) was a Polish medievalist, historian, and professor of history. She specialized in the history of medieval material culture.

Early life
Maria Anna Zofia Gołuchowska was born on 21 February 1916 in the Austro-Hungarian capital Vienna. Her father was Wojciech Maria Agenor Gołuchowski, the Lviv voivode who was senator of the 4th term of the Second Polish Republic. Her mother was Countess Zofia Maria Czesława Gołuchowska (née Baworowska). Maria Gołuchowska spent her childhood in her family estate in Janów, in the Eastern Borderlands. She took history at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University, Paris in 1934 and then returned to Kresy to continue her studies at the University of Lviv.

Marriage and family
She married Henryk Antoni Dembiński (1911–1986), owner of the Przysucha estate. After the wedding, she moved to her husband's estate to run the property with him. She gave birth to six children: Anna Maria (born 1938), Raphael (born and died 1939), Piotr Antoni (1940–2020), Elizabeth (born 1944), Joan (1946–1964), and Marta (born 1950).

Career
Dembińska returned to her discontinued studies after World War I at the University of Warsaw.

After completing her historical studies at the University of Warsaw, she worked for many years at the Institute of History of Material Culture of the Polish Academy of Sciences. There, in the early 1960s, she defended, prepared under the direction of Aleksander Gieysztor, a doctoral dissertation on Polish culinary culture in the Middle Ages. In 1963, the work was published under the title "Food and Drink in Medieval Poland". Despite a small edition of publication (750 copies), this work became a popular field publication and was quickly recognized as a classic in the field of culinary history and the social history of everyday life.

She obtained the title of professor in 1980 – according to some sources – and 1993 according to others.

Due to the language of the publication, her scientific works appeared initially only in Eastern Europe. The exception was a 1960 article published in French. However, in 1973, she published an English summary of her research on the history of nutrition in Poland, making the results of her research available to Western historians for the first time. The publication was made more difficult by the fact that Dembińska had come to different results in her research and wanted to look at the doctrine determined by the Marxists.

Later, her scientific articles and book publications were published in Polish, English, French and German. The summary of her scientific work was published in English in book form only in 1999, three years after her death.

Death
Maria Dembińska died on 1 November 1996 in Warsaw and was buried (along with her husband 10 years earlier) in the Powązki Cemetery.

Posthumous

 * Dembińska, Maria (1999) Food and drink in medieval Poland : Rediscovering a cuisine of the past;
 * Dembińska, Maria (1999) Food and drink in medieval Poland: rediscovering the cuisine of the past, translated by Magdalena Thomas, corrected by William Woys Weaver;
 * Red. red. Dembińska, Maria; Arkuszewski, Antoni ; Ciepłowska, Stanisława ; Epsztein, Tadeusz ; Górzyński, Sławomir ; Kiersnowski, Ryszard ; Konarska, Barbara ; Leskiewiczowa, Janina (t. 6: 2002) Polish Landings of the 20th Century : Biographical Dictionary;