The book is a study of an exceptionally interesting primary source, and of the local and regional world which that source reflected and helped shape. The source is a history of the Cistercian monastery in Henryków, about forty kilometers to the south of Wrocław, in the duchy of Silesia, produced in the monastery in two sections—one completed soon after 1268, the other soon after 1310—and redacted into a single codex in the second or third decade of the fourteenth century. The earlier part of the Book is the work of Peter, the third abbot of the monastery, while the continuation was written by ... More

The book is a study of an exceptionally interesting primary source, and of the local and regional world which that source reflected and helped shape. The source is a history of the Cistercian monastery in Henryków, about forty kilometers to the south of Wrocław, in the duchy of Silesia, produced in the monastery in two sections—one completed soon after 1268, the other soon after 1310—and redacted into a single codex in the second or third decade of the fourteenth century. The earlier part of the Book is the work of Peter, the third abbot of the monastery, while the continuation was written by an anonymous monk at the same community, possibly a later abbot by the same name. The source is conventionally known as the Henryków Book. It offers an exceptionally rich entrée into a number of subjects currently of major interest to medieval historians. It is interesting as a literary work, as an instance of forensic rhetoric, and as a type of legal argument; as an instance of biography and (implicit) autobiography; as a symptom, and example, of the relationship between memory and writing; as a record of lordship, power, economy, the law, social groups, communities, and institutions, in the local and regional world in and about which it was written; and as an example of an active interpretation, and commemoration, of these aspects of reality, by its two authors, for the benefit of their monks—that is, of an active creation of collective memory. This present book devotes one chapter to each of these major subjects, contextualized with the Book's contemporary diplomatic evidence.