1720 visitation of the Bonifrates monastery in Vilnius

The oldest known visitation of the Bonifrater monastery in Vilnius is being published. This is also the oldest known visitation of a GDL Bonifrater monastery in general. The known historical sources of the Vilnius Bonifraters are various (foundations, inventories, minutes of meetings, lists of patients, income and expenses books), but they are far from exhaustive, and are rather fragmented. The act of the visitation of the Vilnius monastery carried out on 29 July – 6 August 1720 informs about several basic things. Attention was drawn to the three main issues – the status of the monastery (buildings, churches, and other facilities), the internal life of the monks and the activities of the Prior and the financial condition. The visitation presents the fathers and brothers living in the monastery. Comparing the monastic families, the situation in Vilnius (2 fathers and 5 brothers) was comparable with the Bonifrater monasteries in Krakow and Lviv. The monks were interviewed, their responses fixed in the visitation, which allows one to obtain information about the internal life of the monastery. The Holy Cross Church and monastery are described in the visitation. Although the comments are not broad and detailed, they should really be valuable to art and architecture historians. The monastery acquired the current artistic look later, after the 1749 fire in Vilnius the church and monastery were repaired and re-decorated. This visitation provides information about the state of the monastery and the carried out repairs. In the Bonifrater monasteries patients were received and treated, they would leave donations, ask for Masses, the monks would purchase medicines for their treatment, would hire doctors, correspond with relatives and so on. Therefore, attention and care were needed to capture all of this financial “movement”. Therefore, considerable attention and thoroughness were needed to fix this financial “movement”. Therefore, in the visitation important attention was paid to the fact of whether the financial accounting was properly conducted in the monastery. In the publication the abbreviations of sources are provided for the convenience of the reader, leaving in brackets only those places that are not very clear or obvious. Several unknown or doubtful areas are marked by question marks and atypical spellings by exclamation points