The Dominican Monastery of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, in Gidle near Częstochowa was founded in 1615. The monks there became the curators of a small figurine of the Virgin Mary, which became famous for its miracles. According to the legend, it was ploughed up in 1516 by a peasant of Gidle, one Jan Czeczka.
The Dominicans originally celebrated services in a small church, built by their founder Anna Dąbrowska, but from the mid-17th century they performed divine service in a magnificent baroque church, and also in the adjacent chapel of Our Lady of Gidle, which had been built previously.
A small quantity of archival materials of the monastery, from the years 1615–1998 have been preserved, consisting of 236 inventory units, approximately occupying 5.50 running meters of shelves in the Archives of the Polish Province of the Dominicans in Krakow.
This collection, in the course of its arrangement by the author of this article, from the autumn 2010 to the summer 2011, has been divided into 12 series of files.
The first series of files consists of mostly paper documents from the years 1623 to 1942, some of the pieces focusing on organizational and financial matters of the monastery. However, these files do not include the oldest document of 1621, issued by the Ordinary of the Place, the Polish Primate, condoning the foundation of the monastery; the substance of this document being known only from a printed notice from the 18th century. The second part of the files relates to religious matters: the establishing by popes and bishops of the day of indulgences and special services, the worship of relics, the production and dissemination of the images of the Virgin of Gidle, and finally the crowning of the miraculous figure, which took place in 1923.
The next four series of files of the Gidle archive include organizational and personnel files of the monastery and matters concerning the supervision of the convent by the authorities of the Order of Preachers (the Dominicans), the Church hierarchy and the secular authorities. The secular authorities’ documents are particularly interesting because of the complicated Polish history, as in these files one can find interesting materials concerning interference in the life of the monastery by the Russian occupying authorities in the 19th century and by the communist authorities after 1945. The sixth series of files, entitled ‘Religious life’, consists of 8 sub-series: first of all the files concerning the worship of the figurine of Our Lady of Gidle, healings made by her intervention and the coronation of the figurine in 1923. Most prominent in this series are the books of religious brotherhoods active at the monastery, with beautiful bindings, often with reliquaries attached to the covers.
Next, the seventh series of the collection contains some very important materials relating to the construction and restoration of the historic church and monastery of Gidle. They are supplemented by information contained in the files in other series of the collection: the books of minutes of the meetings of the convent of Gidle, accountancy books, litigation records.
Books of Accounts and court records are a sub-series in the next, the eighth series of the collection of files, which includes property and business records. In this series, however, the most important and most comprehensive is the sub-series of property documents, mainly from the 17th and the 18th centuries. This part of the collection was arranged and catalogued in the 18th century, and partly, perhaps, already in the mid-17th century. There are files of acts concerning three properties owned by the monastery of Gidle, including, among others, the acts of donations by the founders of the monastery in 1615, and dozens of folders on the estates of the nobility, who owed the rental to the monastery of Gidle, with the possibility of redemption of the property, also ‘the wyderkaf’, a payment in exchange for annuity, funerals, perpetual Masses for the dead, or simply as repayment of debts. The endowment of wyderkaf, in addition to the income of small estates owned by the monastery, formed the basis of an existence for the monks for a long time. In the series of property and business records it is worth to note the folder containing the inventories of the church and monastery. The ninth series of the collection of files includes materials of secondary historical importance, concerning the running of the library and publications subscribed to by the monastery. Much more interesting is yet another, the tenth series of the collection, which includes historical dissertations and monastic chronicles from the 19th and 20th centuries.
Connected to it is the next, eleventh series of archival material, including iconography and files related to it.
The last series of the collection is very important, containing records of foreign origin, inherited by the monastery of Gidle. The most valuable are, preserved in small quantity, the documents and records of the Carthusian monastery, existing in Gidle from 164 to its dissolution in 1819. The fate of the buildings of the monastery after the dissolution of the order is refl ected in archival documents included in the sub-series of the records of the governor of the district of Piotrków. Other units in this sub-series contain valuable information such as the infl uence of the tsarist authorities on Polish clergy and repression after the Uprising of January 1830. The last sub-series are the files of Polish organizations created spontaneously in Gidle, and supported by the monastery, during World War I and the Polish-Bolshevik war in 1920.
