The cultural legacy of the monasteries resolved in the former Polish Commonwealth
and in Silesia during 18th and 19th centuries: the fate, importance, inventory

Jerzy Kaliszuk, ‘Codices deperditi’. Średniowieczne rękopisy łacińskie Biblioteki Narodowej utracone w czasie II wojny światowej [‘Codices deperditi’. Medieval Latin Manuscripts from the National Library Lost During the Second World War] (Dziedzictwo Kulturowe po Skasowanych Klasztorach [Cultural Heritage of Dissolved Monasteries], ed. Marek Derwich, 8/1–3), vols. 1–3, Wrocław: Wrocławskie Towarzystwo Miłośników Historii, 2016, 688, 1379, 754 pp., 7 Tables, 6 Diagrams, 68 Illustrations, Bibliography, Appendix, Indices, Concordance of call numbers, Summary

In 1944 the collection of the National Library in Warsaw was almost entirely destroyed by German troops. This book is the first attempt to reconstruct the collection of medieval Latin manuscripts from that library. The turbulent history of Polish book-collections in the 19th and the first quarter of the 20th centuries prevented pre-war scholars from completing a full description of the collections, and such handwritten catalogues and interventories as existed burnt together with the manuscripts. Based on a painstaking investigation, the author managed to gather information on almost 1,500 medieval Latin manuscripts. In order to reconstruct the content of individual codices, the author made use of a a wide variety of sources: references in scholarly literature of the 19th and 20th centuries; correspondences; partly surviving Russian catalogues and indices; and the miraculously preserved personal notes of the Polish researcher Maria Hornowska (m. 1944).

The book presents not only the history and contents of the collection but also attempts to identify the contexts in which the manuscripts were written and read. A picture thus emerges of complex intellectual network in late medieval Poland, combining monasteries, cathedrals, collegiates, parishes and the University of Cracow and covering virtually the entire area of the state. Books and ideas circulated within this network, creating a sense of common identity in its members above and beyond their specific institutional and geographical communities.

In addition to the analysis of the collection, the publication also contains detailed codicological descriptions of identified medieval Latin manuscripts. The description of the features of individual codices may eventually aid in the identification of other manuscripts that were not burned but taken as booty or souvenirs. The compendium is accompanied by excerpts from historical sources, mainly from Hornowska’s records of destroyed library catalogues, indices, and several reproductions of now lost manuscripts.