Testament as a Source of Researching Urban Literacy in the Volynia Region of the 17th Century

Abstract

Ukrainian historiography has not properly determined the problems of Volynian cities’ secretariats and development of burghers’ literacy in particular. The goal of the article is to research some aspects of these problems by the means of testaments; specifically, to highlight the role of city secretaries in the process of writing down citizens’ testaments and facts that testify about development of urban literacy in cities of Volynia of the 17th century.The municipal registry record analysis implies that executing posthumous inventories, settlement deeds, and especially testaments influenced the development of pragmatic urban literacy. Among the analyzed group of testators, several people wrote down their testaments by themselves. Then city clerks had no option but to accept prepared documents post factum for saving records in town council registers, which in some extent is evidence of the literacy culture development in the Volynian cities in the early modern times. However, the predominant majority of testators were illiterate and in order to approve their act of last will, they signed it with a criss-cross (“X”); the conclusion of the act required specialized assistance from municipal clerks.At those times, testaments were normally written down in the house of a dying person in the presence of municipal officers who provided the document according to an appropriate form and legal validity, and eye-witnesses; or it could be written down at the city hall before the court. City secretaries had a significant role in this procedure, but their level of proficiency was not always appropriate.As in the majority of Central-East European cities of that time, in Volynian cities substantial amounts of acts of last will were given by verbal directions and were not recorded in municipal registers. This fact explains such a small amount of saved documents in comparison with Western European cities. They were not set aside into a separate register series as in bigger crown cities, but the acts were recorded into the current municipal registers in response to citizens’ demand.