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| Bishop Mauritius Ferber, by Anton Moller (posthumous portrait) Photo by Maciej Szczepanczyk |
Apologies for the silence on this blog in the past month – a
result of trying to juggle research trips with actually writing the monograph.
In May, I undertook the last major archival trip for the
monograph, to the archive of the archdiocese of Warmia, in the town of Olsztyn,
in north-east Poland’s lake district. After so many months working from 19C and
20C published editions of the sources, it was good to handle original 16C
materials again, with their spidery brown ink and crisp pages. I always feel a
bit nervous working from published source collections (no matter how respected,
how expertly edited) because part of me worries about not having seen proof
that the original exists. So it was good to see that the spidery brown writing
matched up word for word with the type-set pages I’ve been poring over for two
years.
The trip was also stimulating, however, because it brought
me up close to so many of the characters in the early Polish Reformation story.
In most Polish church archives, the person holding the pen is a professional
scribe, recording chapter minutes or the outgoing letters of the bishop. But,
in the 1000 pages of Bishop Mauritius Ferber’s correspondence, we have not only
letters in the bishop’s own meticulous hand, but the incoming autograph letters
of a host of key figures. There is the handwriting of Copernicus’ close friend
and ally Canon Tiedemann Giese, his Latin wonderfully neat and tiny, and the
occasional German phrase scrawled with great abandon. There’s the fluent, leisurely
humanist script of Piotr Tomicki, the master statesman of King Zygmunt’s
Poland, and the basically illegible, wild ink scrawl of his nephew, the
NeoLatin poet & bishop Andrzej Krzycki. Even Bishop Ferber must have
frowned and squinted when he opened those missives.
There is a whole industry
which compiles psychological profile on the basis of handwriting, but even for
a historian untrained in such dark arts, seeing the very different visual style
of these handwritten letters does make these 16C people seem more tangible,
leaving a hint of their personalities on the page – the person who took pride
in their italic hand, the person who cared only about speed, the person who crossed
out again and again until they had got their phrase on ‘the Lutheran heresy’
just right.
