Rzecz o pożarach w miastach wielkopolskich. Na marginesie pracy Andrzeja Karpińskiego
On the fires in towns of Greater Poland, as described in the work of Andrzej Karpiński

Summary/Abstract: The objective of the paper is to familiarize the readers with the subject of fires in the historic Greater Poland in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. It is a form of a debate with the arguments on this subject presented in the 2020 publication by Andrzej Karpiński (and his collaborators) titled “Fires in towns of the Republic of Poland from the 16th until the 18th century, and their economic, social, and cultural consequences. Catalogue”. (It must be noted here that we do not discuss the information contained in the second, monograph part of the paper). In the first part of the article, the authors reflect upon the validity of the literature Karpiński used and the problem of source selection. The usefulness of iuramenta (a type of urban books), often containing information on fires, is investigated (Karpiński did not research those). The second part of the paper discusses the sources that the author did not use, which also include other types of urban books, enlistment registers from the second half of the 16th century, and the reports of foreign travelers to Greater Poland. Despite the comments made in the article - focusing mostly on facts rather than methodology - the work by Karpiński is definitely worth recommending. As Tomasz Jurek writes, in the future, this publication will become a […] guide for researchers exploring this interesting subject for generations to come.

• Details
• Contents