Polish Week, Part I: Music as Part of Monastic Heritage in Poland

Guido Kraus

Monday, June 22, 2015

It’s Polish Week at RISM! In a series of three posts, Guido Kraus will share his experiences at a recent conference he attended in Poland. He starts with the Hereditas Monasteriorum research project.

The research project Hereditas Monasteriorum, initiated by Polish historians, deals with the special history of monasteries in the territory of the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and Silesia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The goal of the project is to produce an online lexicon of the cultural heritage from over 1,000 Polish monasteries. The special history of Polish monasteries and the numerous monasteries that were dissolved in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries presents researchers with special challenges. Provenance research therefore plays a major role. Music is one aspect that is being documented, in addition to monastic property and assets, documents and records, books of vows, printed items, manuscripts, and works of art. More information about the organization and goals of the project can be read on the project website.

Several of our RISM colleagues are contributing to the online documentation of musical sources: Agnieszka Drożdżewska (Wrocław), Ewa Hauptman-Fischer (Warsaw), Patryk Frankowski (Poznań), Grzegorz Joachimiak (Wrocław), Alina Mądry (Poznań), Remigiusz Pośpiech (Opole/Wrocław), Ludmiła Sawicka (Cardiff/Lublin) und Katarzyna Spurgjasz (Warsaw).

The online database is in Polish. Enter a monastery, such as Cystersi, Lubiąż. On the right are filters. Click on Muzykalia for the musical sources. Have fun looking around!

What else is new in Polish source research? Stay tuned for part 2, a description of the conference Klasztor i muzyka / Monasteries and Music, on Wednesday.

Category: New at RISM