Volume 7: The Cracow Region part 3

The Complete Works vol. 7: The Cracow Region part 3. Wrocław – Poznań 1963, pp. XVIII+350, illustration. Photo-offset re-edition; first edition: Cracow 1874.

The third part of the monograph on the Cracow region includes a description of a transcendental world, that is, conceptions about the universe and the world, demonological beliefs, witchcraft and magic, knowledge of animals, plants and medicine, as well as superstitions. This material comes mainly from the notes of Antonina Konopczanka who helped Kolberg gather collections of folkloristic and ethnographic material from the villages around Cracow. It is supplemented with information taken from publications of M. Zieleniewski, K.W. Wójcicki, Ł. Gołębiowski, R. Berwiński, and others, as well as from old Polish herbaria. A few fables were also inserted among the beliefs description as an exemplification. The volume is supplied with extensive notes, out of proportion in relation to the source material (notes: 161 pp., content 183 pp.), in which Kolberg included mythological and etymological considerations, based mainly on the works of J. Grimm and I. Hanusz. He later discarded this method (a comment of that kind was also included only in the series on Great Poland), realizing its uselessness for science. In The Notes there were also included excerpts from three seventeenth- and eighteenth-century works on witchcraft. The volume is provided with an illustration of the people from Modlnica participating in the wedding.