Registers of town offices of the Russian Voivodeship of the 16th-17th centuries as a source for the prosopography of urban scribes

Abstract

The paper analyzes registers of town offices of the Russian Voivodeship of the 16th-17th centuries as a source for the prosopography of urban scribes. First of all, based on the registers we managed to identify scribes’ names and term of their career, sometimes also ethnical and social origin. They contain data on scribes’ participation in court trials and property deals, in particular, in those concerning land purchase and sale. The data on education primarily is concentrated in albums of students, and is absent in the registers. We managed to trace scribes’ study in Krakiv and Zamoistia academies, and also trace the scribes’ transfers from one governmental post to the other. The study was conducted on the basis of archival fonds of magistrates of the Russian Voivodeship, deposited in the Central State Historical Archive in Lviv. The obtained data on scribes is an auxiliary material for conducting a complex analysis of registers writing.

Keywords

• scribe, town office, prosopography, palaeography, Russian Voivodeship.