Testaments of Liubech burgesses as historical source and monuments of Hetmanshchyna clerical work

Abstract

The goal of the work. Determining the informative potential of the testaments of the Liubech burgesses of the Cossack era, as well as the peculiarities of concluding this type of documents. The methodology involves the use of historical-logical, comparative and empirical research methods, as well as techniques of paleographic analysis. The scientific novelty of the article is due to the fact that for a long time the testaments of the inhabitants of the cities of the Ukrainian hetman state, including Liubech, remained unexplored. It is a question of finding out the possibility of their source and information potential, as well as considering the process of unification of forms and text structure of documents. Therefore, the source analysis performed by the author will help those scholars who study the history of the cities of the Hetmanshchyna in general and Chernihiv-Sivershchyna in particular. Conclusions. The described documents are an important historical source, which makes it possible to recreate various aspects of the social and everyday life of the inhabitants of the town of Liubech in the second half of the 17th– the first half of the 18th century. The source and information potential of testaments can be successfully used to study the socio-economic history of Liubech, norms of contemporary inheritance law, cultural and living conditions, genealogy of individual town-dweller families, regional toponymy and even to outline the mentality of the compilers. The testamentary form of the Liubech burgesses contains all the main clauses that were inherent in the relevant business papers of the early modern period, with the exception of the arenga. The presence of some typical clichés that in the middle of the 17th century have already lost their validity, indicates the conservative nature of regional office work.