A Local Society in Transition. The Henryków Book and Related Documents (review)

The study of medieval Europe has for a long time focused on its perceived core: England, France, Iberia, and Italy, at best with a passing glance at Germany. The “periphery” in Scandinavia and especially Central and Eastern Europe, by contrast, has remained largely beyond the gaze of those not already working on these regions. This has begun to change in recent years, with studies such as Robert Bartlett’s The Making of Europe (Princeton, 1993) seeking to bring Eastern and Central Europe into the mainstream of medieval European history, or Nora Berend’s work on Hungary. A renewed interest in Central and Eastern European history has further been fanned by the ongoing project at the Central European University in Budapest to make available reprints of Latin editions of medieval sources (with the original editions often unavailable outside specialized research libraries in the “Old West”), accompanied by up-to-date commentaries and modern English translations. The present volume, by the leading Western expert on the history of medieval Poland, who has spent the last twenty years conveying the splendor and importance of medieval Poland to Western audiences, forms part of this renewed impetus. A Local Society offers a monograph-length introduction to and a fluent and wellannotated translation of a cartulary together with a foundation history with bishops’ list, composed probably in the late-thirteenth century (the sole surviving manuscript stems from the fourteenth) at the Cistercian abbey of Henryków in modern Silesia. The book is designed for an audience of both undergraduates and scholars: Górecki mentions just how much work on the book has benefited from his teaching, in both the United States and Europe, and the introduction offers a thoughtful and lucid guide to basic terms, structures, and historiographical debates. While, especially in the early stages, some of that guidance presupposes virtually no familiarity with medieval Europe, this may reflect the challenges of teaching medieval Europe to an audience of Californian adolescents, and the introduction moves, in any case, very quickly to a most lucid exposition of the Henryków Book’s wider context, of great service not only to undergraduates but also to scholars as yet unfamiliar with the Polish experience. We owe Górecki a collective debt of gratitude for producing a work of such passion and great scholarship.

The text is an important one for a number of reasons. It is one of the longest surviving documents from medieval Poland and, alongside the recent reprint and translation of the Gesta Principum Polonorum (2003), makes two key texts of medieval Polish history available to an Anglophone audience. It covers a period of immense and rapid change: the increasing settlement of Germanspeaking newcomers, succession struggles within the ducal dynasty, and the Mongol invasions. The Henryków Book thus illustrates the impact of epochal and sometimes cataclysmic events on a specific local society, documented in much greater detail than elsewhere in the Latin Middle Ages. It provides invaluable documentation for the social, economic, and political structures of the thirteenth century, used to great effect by Górecki in his introduction. It demonstrates to just what extent the Polish experience both reflected and modified broader European trends and developments, and how paying due heed to these materials can broaden our understanding not just of Silesia but also of medieval Christendom as a whole. It finally—unusually for a cartulary, and in no small measure thanks to Górecki’s fluent translation and careful annotation—makes a good read. It includes some wonderful vignettes, such as one involving the duke Boleslaw the Tall, who, to keep his subjects as far away from him as possible, equipped his residences with such elaborate secret exits and passageways that the monks who sought to confirm one of their privileges needed to take extraordinary measures to actually locate him. Numerous such episodes...