The editions of seventeenth-century nobility testaments from the municipal records from Greater Poland and the Halicz region

Abstract

The article presents two already available source editions of testaments of the nobility from the municipal records of Greater Poland from 1631–1655 and 1657–1680, and discusses the edition of volumes planned for 2015, concerning testaments from Greater Poland from 1681––1700, and for 2018, concerning testaments from the municipal records and nobility court records of the region of Halicz from the 17th c.The author presents information on documents included in those volumes and on the testa-tors; he also considers research opportunities offered by collections of hundreds of wills from the selected regions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from particular periods. Editions of that type are clearly necessary in view of historians’ increased interest in testaments from the early-modern period, especially that the original documents are kept in various archives, which makes archival research very time-consuming.