This article entitled “Pastoral service of Bernardine Fathers in Yarmolyntsi” covers the years 1761–1832. Paweł Starżyński, the owner of the city of Yarmolyntsi, in 1761 invited Franciscan Observants – Bernardine to the pastoral ministry. It was also this year that the monastery parish was founded. In the church under the invocation of St. John of Nepomuk and St. Anthony of Padua brothers performed sacramental service and spiritual care of the local people. In addition to pastoral and preaching work it is worth mentioning the existence of a parish school. It was not only a place for lay education, but also a place of catechization of children. Additionally, the brotherhood of St. Anna was active in the parish and dealt with spiritual care of adults. After 70 years of Bernardine’s work in Yarmolyntsi, on August 20, 1832, according to the Supreme Order of the Head of the Podolia Province no 23992 to the Kamianets Spiritual Consistory, the tsarist authorities liquidated the monastery and the monks had to leave the place of their work. Monastery of Bernardine Fathers was taken over for the needs of the tsarist authorities, and the church was transferred into the hands of the Orthodox Church.
Among the records from the Franciscan Observants monastery in Ostrzeszów (PA 298/6), kept at the Archdiocesan Archive in Poznań, there is a copy of a decree issued on 8 November 1797 by king Frederick William II. He imposed an obligation on mendicant orders to pay a tax on animal slaughter and the production of beverages, which they had formerly been exempt from. By way of compensation, they received a small quarterly financial aid for the religious, novices and their servants, as well as a certain sum per every bed for the infirm in the monastery. In order to receive these benefits, the superiors had to submit reports on the headcount every three months. If they failed to provide true information, they could face an inspection from the provincial officials or lose the compensation. The decree was most probably intended for the officials of the Kalisz department created in 1796, since it was signed by the then president of the Piotrków camera von Oppeln-Bronikowski and its deputy director von Reinbeck. It remains unknown how the Ostrzeszów Franciscan Observants fathers came into possession of the document.
The article presents the results of a preliminary research on the sources for the history of the mendicant economy as exemplified by monasteries from the state of the Order of Teutonic Knights in Prussia, with special emphasis on the territories which after 1466 were incorporated to Poland as the so-called Royal Prussia, and which were composed mainly of the lands of Pomeralia (Gdańsk Pomerania), taken control of by the Order after 1308. The lands of the Order in Prussia, and later the Royal and Teutonic Prussia, hosted convents of four mendicant orders: the Dominicans, the Franciscans and the Franciscan Observants, the Austin Hermits, and the Carmelites. The documentation concerning the monasteries in question has been preserved to a various degree. These sources are currently dispersed in several state (Gdańsk, Toruń) and Church (diocesan archives in Peplin and Olsztyn) archives, as well as the former archive of the Teutonic Order, which is currently kept at Dahlem (Berlin). Most of them have been taken over from the archives of abandoned monasteries in the 16th century (the Gdańsk and Toruń archives) and during the 19th century monastery dissolutions (the Peplin archive). The remaining part of the documentation are records produced and kept at municipal archives in towns where mendicant orders were present. All these sources offer an insight into the income structure of mendicant orders from these territories. What makes research difficult, however, is the lack of bookkeping records. Proper estimation of sources can be achieved only when they are studied in a complex way, including both the monastery sources and the municipal records. Only by making use of the entire content which the latter offer might we obtain a reliable picture of the economic situation and the social role played by mendicants in urban centres.
The article examines an inventory of monastic records kept in the Archdiocesan Archives in Gniezno. It covers archive documents from the Monastic Records section as well as archival units spread across various fonds in the archives. The Monastic Records section was established in the 1970s following a separation of monastic records from the Archives of the Metropolitan Chapter fonds. The section also encompasses archive documents from the Monastery of the Norbertine Sisters in Strzelno, which were transferred from Strzelno to Gniezno on Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński’s orders in 1961. The remaining part of the inventory is made up primarily of records from the period of dissolutions in the 18th and 19th centuries kept in the Archives of the Metropolitan Chapter fonds as well as records of the various parishes. The whole collection of archive documents is very rich and varied in terms of its contents, and concerns religious orders established in the Archdiocese of Gniezno before the 1850s.
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