Urban Literacy in Late Medieval Poland by Agnieszka Bartoszewicz

Abstract

Reviewed by: Urban Literacy in Late Medieval Poland by Agnieszka Bartoszewicz Robert Curry Bartoszewicz, Agnieszka, Urban Literacy in Late Medieval Poland (Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy, 39), Turnhout, Brepols, 2017; hardback; pp. xxiv, 484; 28 b/w, 8 colour illustrations; R.R.P. €120.00; ISBN 9782503565118. During the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, the period covered in Agnieszka Bartoszewicz's compendious study of urban literacy in late medieval Poland, the kingdom of Poland or Commonwealth [Rzeczpospolita], as it came to be known, developed into a vast, polyglot, multi-ethnic polity. Under the Jagiellonian kings, Sigismund the Elder and Sigismund August, his son by Bona Sforza, Poland enjoyed a 'Golden Age' in literature, science, and the arts. Bartoszewicz's monograph, first published in 2012 (Warsaw University Press) and now translated into English, is the summation of more than two decades of painstaking archival research. She has combed through voluminous secondary literature to provide a most readable synoptic coverage, 'ordering and recapitulating the state of knowledge on the subject' (p. 21). As a glance at the maps included with the prefatory matter (pp. xviii–xxiii) makes clear, the administrative structure and urban networks of the kingdom developed extensively across its western and central territories; that is, around the major cities of Poznań, Warsaw, and Cracow-Kazimierz. In the eastern territories, however, the great city of Lwów may have rivalled Cracow and Gniezno as an ecclesiastical centre but the urban development radiating from it proceeded at a far slower pace. It is also a fact of history that Fate has been far kinder to the old royal capital, its archives and architecture, than it has to most other cities in Poland. Bartoszewicz acknowledges that her book reflects this fact and, perforce, is Cracow-centric. Given the complexity of her undertaking and its geographical, linguistic, and temporal scope, manageable boundaries had to be set. Although the English-language version includes important new material, updates the bibliography, and substantially revises and reorganizes chapters, it does not broaden the coverage of the original Polish edition to include documents in languages other than Latin, German, and Polish: 'The rich Ruthenian and Jewish cultures of the written word, which developed simultaneously, cannot be taken into consideration, as they demand different scholarly expertise' (p. 2). It would be churlish to demand [End Page 184] even more from a study as exhaustively detailed as Bartoszewicz's; and yet, one cannot but wonder how different would be the picture conveyed of urban literacy in Cracow and Lwów, for example, if the contribution of Central Europe's most literate of communities, the Jews, had been sketched in, if only in part. Hebrew was, after all, a subject taught at the Cracow Academy. The great preponderance of source material, disparate, scattered, and often fragmentary as it is, comes from entries in municipal, court, and ecclesiastical registers that have been preserved in city and town archives. Bartoszewicz meets the challenge of imposing a narrative flow on this welter of detail, much of it dry and repetitious, by highlighting snippets of information, nuggets that give us a glimpse into the lives of individuals, their business dealings, their love-lives, and their preparations for the next life. Playing a key role in the transmission of such lively, personal information were the clerici uxorati, a professional group unlikely to be met in studies of urban literacy in Western Europe. They were married clergy with no pastoral responsibilities whose prime means of livelihood was providing scrivener services; occasionally, they also appear as teachers at parish schools. Particularly valuable is the evidence Bartoszewicz adduces in her chapter 'From Vernacular Memory to Written Record', attesting to the fluid relationship in law that existed during the mid- to late fifteenth century between oral and written testimony, specifically in the matter of wills and testaments. 'Only the most important decisions were put in writing, and the recording might take place after the testator's death, on the basis of the witnesses' depositions' (p. 197). Moreover, the process of registering a will was often accompanied by a ritual that took the form of an oral declaration affirming the right of the testator to dispose of his/her goods. At such occasions...