Eleven monasteries of the Dominican Brothers and one of the Dominican Sisters existed in the area of the Diocese of Kamyanets-Podilskyi in the first half of the 19th century. Thanks to the visitations preserved from that period, we can find out about the personal makeup, emolument of the monastery, and its book collections. The latter are the subject of this article. Their analysis is based on the visitation protocols from 1824. Documents that allow for a detailed analysis and comparison of all monasteries as far as their book collections are concerned are preserved in the National Archive of the Khmelnytskyi Oblast. The source is even more important as it is the last one pertinent to all monasteries before their dissolution in 1832 (only the Dominican Sisters in Kamyanets-Podilskyi were dissolved in 1864). Based on these visitations, we managed to learn about the size of the book collections, their thematic scope, age, as well as the languages in which the books were written. The analysis led to the conclusion that Dominican libraries in Podolia were rather small. The biggest ones were in Kamyanets-Podilskyi and Letychiv, the rest of libraries fell far behind them. In the remaining libraries, homiletical and ascetic literature dominated, evidently corresponding to the preaching work of the monks. The only convent that belonged to the Order of St. Dominic also did not possess an exceptional collection. However, the negligent catalogue did not allow for a deeper analysis.
The researches on the Dominican libraries are poorly advanced, although they already have some scientific descriptions. The least known is the history of the monastic libraries of brothers preachers on the eastern fringe of the First Polish Republic, which after the partitions were the part of the Russian Empire (in the Polish historiography known as “the taken lands”, and in Russian “the western lands”). The Dominican convents on those lands were under the jurisdiction of three provinces – Polish (part of the Volynian province), Russian (second part of the Volynian province, but also the whole Podolian and Kievan provinces), and Lithuanian (Vilnius, Minsk and Grodno provinces). The monasteries varied in size and thus their library collections had also different number of volumes. We did not have the knowledge on that matter so far, as there were no known inventories and catalogues providing such information. Therefore, it is important to discover them, and to determine on this base the sizes of the collections of each monastery. The query in the archives and libraries in Eastern Europe has brought very good results, as it turned out that there can be found many valuable sources on this subject. This paper focuses mainly on the two essential types of sources: inventories and library catalogues. A lot of inventories containing detailed lists of books with titles, places, dates of publication and formats were found. The structure of the inventories is basically unified: the volumes are grouped by fields, such as for instance: Bible, dogmatic theology, moral theology, history of the Church, general history (secular), apologetics, sometimes also banned books (libri prohibiti). The records of volumes contain also cannonical visitations, performed by the bishops or their delegates, which can also be considered as a kind of inventory; similarly to the intrinsic inventories, they are grouped by fields. Rarely, both in the inventories and visitations, there can be found groupings by formats; there are only few examples, this concerns only very small collections. This paper provides an overview on the state of research of Dominican libraries in the eastern borderlands of the First Polish Republic, and later on the western provinces of the Russian Empire. Although those surveys are still week, they can be found not only in Poland, but also in the neighbouring eastern countries. Afterwards, basing on the collected source material, the situation of the monastic libraries during the annexation period is briefly outlined. Finally, the status and locations of stored inventories and other types of collections (and therefore the visitations) are presented. At the end of this work is placed a list of the sources with the year of origin, the current storage in archives or libraries, and the signature. This list does not include, however, the Russian archives and libraries. That requires another queries. The essay is limited only to Polish, Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Lithuanian collections. Certainly, this is not a complete list of sources, but it shows how important is carrying out queries in the sources containing a lot of valuable material. It especially concerns the convents dissolved in 19th century, whose archives and collections were destroyed or dispersed. Nowadays, only those sources can help us to learn the monastic collections, and thus the intellectual culture of brothers.
This article gives an outline of the Domenican parish ministry in the Roman-Catholic Archdiocese of Lviv in 1918-1939, where 9 Dominican monasteries and the same parishes were located. Three parishes was incorporated into the monastery of Lviv. Polish Province of Dominican Order had got the most of the parish in the archdiocese of Lviv. Two parishes were transferred to the diocesan clergy in the second half of the 30 of the twentieth century. An important element in the pastoral care of the parish was parish catechesis in schools and outside them. Parish work was also accompanied by a variety of special pastoral care. Here I discussed only Marian shrines that worked at the Dominican parishes through which parishes are better developed. Other forms of pastoral special (brotherhoods and religious associations and work among students and intellectuals) has been omitted here, because they require separate studies. The pastoral activity intermingled typical folk devotions, the cult of relics and saints and more complex intellectual formation, aiming to deepen their religious knowledge. In all these activities preaching was essential. The article revealed research capabilities, as well as the state mainly from sources preserved in the collections of the Archives of the Polish Province of the Dominican Order in Cracow.
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