This book consists of an annotated translation of a history of a
Cistercian monastery known as the Henryków Book and
of some thirty charters further illustrating that history, as well
as a sustained introductory essay.
The monastery at Henryków, in the duchy of Silesia, was
founded between 1222 and 1228, and endowed with an estate in those
years and continuously thereafter. The Book was composed at the
monastery itself, in three sections: the first and the third by its
third abbot, Peter, in or soon after 1268; the second by an
anonymous monk, around 1310. The charters were issued between 1225
and 1310 by the dukes of Silesia and by others interested in the
monastery and its estate: the bishops of Wroclaw and Poznan, the
monastery’s neighbours, its donors and their descendants.
Both the Book and the charters reveal an unusually
well-documented medieval world and the political and legal
relationships, the patterns of social and economic power, that
inform it. Although a history rooted in a particular, local region,
it nevertheless deals with phenomena of interest to all
medievalists, providing vivid protraits of medieval peasants,
townspeople, lords, clerics, and rulers; valuable illustration of
agrarian and urban expansion; evidence for the proliferation of
Cistercian monasteries and their impact; and lively and recurrent
accounts of conflict over property and physical transgression.
These sources also contribute to the growing interest among
historians in the medieval ‘frontier’ and in the
complex cultural interplay between the indigenous and immigrant,
stable and transitional, on which the very idea of Europe is
founded.