Abstract
The present paper discusses an unpublished collection of documents compiled by the historian from Bukovina Teodor Balan in the sixth decade of the past century. The series is entitled The documents of the monasteries from Bukovina and comprises an introductory volume, called Study, which presents a short history of the 17 monasteries from Bukovina, and 12 volumes comprising documents issued between 1402 and 1875, totaling 1113 princely charters, registers, inventories, property documents etc. handwritten on 4000 pages. Balan’s intention was to offer researchers a thematic corpus, gathering together documents from various publications, some which are not easily accessible, with a lot of the documents being hitherto unpublished. Many documents are followed by summaries of other related documents, as well as by explanations, identifications of persons and of places etc. The manuscript is preserved in the collections of Suceava National Archives.
The author argues that the publication of Balan’s manuscript is worthwhile and will provide researchers with a valuable instrument which will soon become indispensable.
Keywords
15th–19th centuries, corpus of documents, Moldavia, monasteries from Bukovina, Teodor Balan
