Dokumentacja konsystorska z XV i początku XVI wieku odkryta w katedrze gnieźnieńskiej
The consistorial documentation from the 15th and early 16th centuries discovered in Gniezno Cathedral

Summary/Abstract: In August and September 2015 six boxes of unknown late medieval paper documents were found in a room over the northern nave of Gniezno Cathedral, which served as a storage of damaged acts of the Archdiocesan Archive. The collection had already been discovered in 1961 during the works on regothisation of the cathedral, but no cataloguing or conservatory works were started, and the information about the discovery did not reach the scholarly community, so the finding had been forgotten. The provisional study undertaken now made it possible to establish that the collections contains about five hundred documents preserved in full or major parts and over two thousand small fragments. The date mostly from the second half of the 15th and early 16th centuries. They testify to the activities of the archbishop’s consistory in Gniezno. The collection primarily consists of officials’ mandates, legal proclamations of the sides in court cases (libelli and positiones of various types), and protocols of witnesses’ testimonies (six examples of such documents are appended to the paper). In the collections of Polish archives only occasionally can one find similar documentation (mandates of officials from Włocławek or process writings sewed into the books of inscriptions in Gniezno and Poznań), examples of which are now known mostly from formulary books, textbooks of process Canon law (ordines iudiciarii) and inserts in other documents. The newly rediscovered documents may be compared to the so-called cause papers, known from the archdioceses of Canterbury and York.

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