Testamenty mieszczan bocheńskich (XVI-XVII wiek)

A will carries substantial amounts of information about the life of the person who wrote it, dictated it or accepted the existing form. In this work, the last will is presented as a document subject to conventions and a source revealing an image, albeit an incomplete one, of the testator. 531 burghers’ wills were analysed (261 belonging to men, 256 to women, 14 to married couples) of the 635 surviving last wills of the inhabitants of modern Bochnia, almost 98% of which were entered in the municipal records. The main sources queried were the municipal records, but also other sources held in Kraków archives and others: the National Archives, the Archives of the Province of the Bernardine Fathers, the Archives of the Metropolitan Curia and St. Nicholas Parish in Bochnia. The timeframe of the book is determined by the state of preservation of the sources. One of the oldest burgher wills analysed was written by Mikołaj Długosz in 1487, while the most recent document by Grzegorz Serkowski was dated 1787. As it is difficult to draw conclusions on the basis of just ten extant wills from the eighteenth century, this century was not included in the study, nor was the fifteenth century.