The ideas of the Age of Enlightenment in Poland were developed later than in Western Europe, as the Polish bourgeoisie was weaker, and szlachta (nobility) culture (Sarmatism) together with the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth political system were in deep crisis. The period of Polish Enlightenment began in the 1730s–40s, peaked in the reign of Poland's king, Stanisław August Poniatowski, went into decline with the Third Partition of Poland (1795) – a national tragedy inspiring a short period of sentimental writing – and ended in 1822, replaced by Romanticism.

Sarmatism was an ethno-cultural ideology within the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. It was the dominant Baroque culture and ideology of the nobility that existed in times of the Renaissance to the 18th centuries. Together with the concept of "Golden Liberty", it formed a central aspect of the Commonwealth social elites’ culture and society. At its core was the unifying belief that the people of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth descended from the ancient Iranian Sarmatians, the legendary invaders of contemporary Polish lands in antiquity.