LECTORI SALUTEM

The hard-copy version (ISBN 963 86569 4 8) of the present e-guide grew out of a first draft prepared for a Summer Institute held at CEU in cooperation with CARA in 2000. We decided to enlarge and revise it for the session at the 40th Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo, with the help of friends and graduates of the Medieval Studies Department at Central European University (Budapest) and the support of the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto. None the less, it is still a draft, but we felt that half a loaf is more than none.

The resources are grouped according to present-day geography, not identical with medieval boundaries. We thought that researchers would wish to see what can they find if they visit one of the countries, and expect that they will be aware of the fact that records for regions that belonged to, say, the medieval kingdom of Hungary, may now be in Slovakia, or, in turn, records of Transylvania, now Romania, may be (also) in Hungarian depositories. The guide to resources in Poland contains, inevitably, sources for the history of Lithuania and other territories not presently part of the Republic as well. And so on. On the other hand, precisely because of the changes in boundaries, overlaps and repetitions (e.g. between Hungary and Croatia) could not be avoided and we did not attempt to sort them out. The sequence of countries is, of course, arbitrary. We decided to go from north to south.

Considering that Slavist medievalists and Byzantinists have their own reference works, this time we did not include extensive information on resources on the Slavia Orthodoxa in Greek or the eastern Slavic languages. Altogether, we gave preference to titles and locations that refer to or hold written sources in Latin, whithout fully excluding others. At some point this Guide may have to be augmented with sections on countries adjacent to the presently included ones. (Of course, this raises the question of what is „eastern” or „east-central” Europe--an issue we do not wish to discuss now.)

Unfortunately, we did not have enough time to complete the guide for all the areas that may be of interest. We are aware of the fact that one country may be better “covered” than another, even if there would be ample resources to list. Moreover, we did not this time manage to have for every country all the sections (archival, manuscript, etc.) equally completed or--what may be also useful for colleagues--to list contacts to research and teaching institutions. That should also be added soon. The contributors from the single countries would be glad to assist colleagues planning to do research in their region. Their addresses are listed at the end of the guide.

For visual resources that have been left out from the present comprised version, the Guide to Visual Resources of Medieval East-Central Europe edited by Béla Zsolt Szakács; Budapest: CEU Medievalia, vol. 2, 2001 (which contains detailed reference to topographies, image-banks, photographic archives, etc.) should be consulted. Short reference to these is also available here.

We did not attempt to make all country guides uniform; the contributors followed a general lay-out, but designed their guides independently. We standardized style and format only in the most general terms. Let us, finally, repeat that this is nothing more than a practical guide and does not claim “scholarly merits.”

For the contributors,
János M. Bak as project co-ordinator