Sources — The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth

General works

Davies, Norman. God's Playground: A History of Poland. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981; rev. 2005. Still the entry point in English, and volume one is essentially a history of the Commonwealth. Opinionated and enormously readable.
Davies, Norman. Heart of Europe: The Past in Poland's Present. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984; rev. 2001. Shorter, and structured backwards from the present, which works better than it sounds.
Stone, Daniel. The Polish-Lithuanian State, 1386–1795. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001. The best single-volume scholarly treatment of the Commonwealth as such in English.
Frost, Robert I. The Oxford History of Poland-Lithuania, Vol. I: The Making of the Polish-Lithuanian Union, 1385–1569. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. The major modern work, and the one that takes Lithuania seriously as an equal party. Volume two is awaited.
Butterwick, Richard. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, 1733–1795: Light and Flame. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020. The last sixty years, and the best account of the reform movement and why it was crushed.
Snyder, Timothy. The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. How four modern nations were made out of one early modern state. Indispensable, and the best answer to the question of who the heirs are.

Chapters I–III

Frost, Robert I. “The Nobility of Poland-Lithuania, 1569–1795.” In The European Nobilities, ed. H. M. Scott. London: Longman, 1995.
Lukowski, Jerzy. Liberty's Folly: The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Eighteenth Century. London: Routledge, 1991. On Golden Liberty as a political culture, and what it cost.
Lukowski, Jerzy. Disorderly Liberty: The Political Culture of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Eighteenth Century. London: Continuum, 2010.
Bardach, Juliusz. Studia z ustroju i prawa Wielkiego Księstwa Litewskiego. Warsaw, 1970. In Polish. The standard work on the Grand Duchy's separate legal order and the Lithuanian Statutes.
Kiaupa, Zigmantas, et al. The History of Lithuania Before 1795. Vilnius: Lithuanian Institute of History, 2000. The Lithuanian account, in English. Read it against Davies rather than after him.
Sysyn, Frank E. Between Poland and the Ukraine: The Dilemma of Adam Kysil, 1600–1653. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1985.

Chapters IV–VI

Frost, Robert I. The Northern Wars: War, State and Society in Northeastern Europe, 1558–1721. Harlow: Longman, 2000. The military and fiscal context, and the best explanation of why the Commonwealth could not keep up.
Frost, Robert I. After the Deluge: Poland-Lithuania and the Second Northern War, 1655–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Plokhy, Serhii. The Cossacks and Religion in Early Modern Ukraine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Plokhy, Serhii. The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine. New York: Basic Books, 2015. The necessary Ukrainian frame for the whole eastern half of this volume.
Kołodziejczyk, Dariusz. The Crimean Khanate and Poland-Lithuania. Leiden: Brill, 2011. The southern frontier, the Tatar raids and the slave trade that ran off them.
Brzezinski, Richard. Polish Armies 1569–1696. 2 vols. Oxford: Osprey, 1987. For the husaria, and sober about the wings.

Chapters VII–X

Lukowski, Jerzy. The Partitions of Poland: 1772, 1793, 1795. London: Longman, 1999. The standard account, and careful about contingency.
Butterwick, Richard. Poland's Last King and English Culture: Stanisław August Poniatowski, 1732–1798. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.
Zamoyski, Adam. The Last King of Poland. London: Jonathan Cape, 1992.
Zamoyski, Adam. Poland: A History. London: HarperPress, 2009. The best-written single-volume history for the general reader.
Kaplan, Herbert H. The First Partition of Poland. New York: Columbia University Press, 1962.
Storozynski, Alex. The Peasant Prince: Thaddeus Kosciuszko and the Age of Revolution. New York: Thomas Dunne, 2009.

Societies

Hundert, Gershon David. Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. The standard modern account, and the best single book on the subject.
Teller, Adam. Money, Power, and Influence in Eighteenth-Century Lithuania: The Jews on the Radziwiłł Estates. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016. On the arenda system and the structural position it created.
Rosman, Moshe. The Lords' Jews: Magnate-Jewish Relations in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.
Kamiński, Andrzej. “Neo-Serfdom in Poland-Lithuania.” Slavic Review 34, no. 2 (1975): 253–68. On the second serfdom, which is the part of the golden age nobody puts on a poster.
Kryczyński, Stanisław. Tatarzy litewscy. Warsaw, 1938; repr. Gdańsk, 2000. In Polish. The classic study of the Lipka Tatars, Muslim Commonwealth citizens since the fourteenth century.
Bogucka, Maria. Baltic Commerce and Urban Society, 1500–1700: Gdańsk/Danzig and its Polish Context. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003.

Contemporary sources

The Henrician Articles and Pacta Conventa, 1573. The Commonwealth's working constitution, including the clause releasing subjects from obedience to a king who breaks it.
The Warsaw Confederation, 28 January 1573. One page. The first general guarantee of religious liberty in Europe, and on the UNESCO Memory of the World register.
The Constitution of the Third of May, 1791. Europe's first codified constitution. Short, and worth reading beside the American one written four years earlier.
Pasek, Jan Chryzostom. Memoirs of the Polish Baroque. Trans. Catherine Leach. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. A provincial nobleman's memoir of the 1650s–80s. Vain, violent, funny, and the best single window into szlachta mentality.
Vincent, Joachim, et al. Accounts of the Sejm in Volumina Legum, the collected statutes, 1732–82. The Commonwealth's legislation, in Latin and Polish; digitised.
Connor, Bernard. The History of Poland. London, 1698. By an Irish physician to Jan III Sobieski. The best contemporary English-language description, and it explains the constitution to Englishmen who found it incredible.