Acknowledgements
In the course of writing this book, I have become indebted to a number of wonderful persons for all their support and encouragement. I am especially grateful to my wife Monika and my daughter Celinka. Their patience and understanding were of great help when I was struggling my way through the manuscripts of the Weichbild. I also owe a debt of gratitude to my colleagues from the Chair of History of Polish Law and the Chair of Church Law and Law on Religious Denominations at the Faculty of Law and Administration of the Jagiellonian University. In a series of academic meetings chaired by Professor Wacław Uruszczak, I was able to present my research and discuss research in progress. I would like to thank Professor Uruszczak in particular for reading the manuscript of my book and offering valuable comments and counsel in his pre-publication review. In the course of my work I could always count on professional assistance, useful advice, and friendly guidance from Dr Krzysztof Fokt and draw fresh inspiration from conversations with Dr Władysław Pęksa. I would like to thank them both.
I made up my mind to embark on this project after talking it over at some length with Professor Zygfryd Rymaszewski, a leading authority on the Saxon-Magdeburg Law who had spent years studying the manuscripts of the Sachsenspiegel. I found his comments and advice highly motivational and of great help in the course of my research.
I would also like to thank Professor Marian Mikołajczyk for taking so much of his time to discuss and aid with all kinds of problems that cropped up at every stage of my research.
I would also like to express my deep gratitude to Ms Jagoda Marszałek for her help in the field of Latin and the collation of Latin texts. I am grateful Professor Martin Langner for a linguistic consultation concerning sources in German.
To view the extant manuscripts of the Weichbild, I had to visit libraries and archives in Poland, Austria, Germany, and Russia. In each of those institutions, I was offered all the help and cooperation I could possibly need. This is why I would like to thank all the librarians and archivists for their kind assistance. Without their generous help, I would not have been able to get hold of the primary and secondary material for my analyses and comparative studies. My special thanks go to Dr Wieland Carls from Leipzig.
This book was completed during a six-month postdoctoral fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt am Main. I would like to express my thanks to Professor Heiner Lück, Dr Heinz Mohnhaupt, and Professor Laurent Waelkens for their help in preparing the initial draft of my project, and, finally, I would like to thank the Heads of Institute, Professor Thomas Duve and Professor Stephan Vogenauer, for endorsing the project and providing excellent working conditions for its completion.
Frankfurt am Main, 7 September 2017