Colloquia Bibliologa Wratislaviensia for the fourth time in the Wroclaw University Library!

As part of the series, we invite you to a lecture:

"Wroclaw's Walloon Book" – guides to the Sudetes' gold in a 15th-century alchemical codex

Lecture by mgr Sabina Kwiecień (Doctoral College of History, University of Wroclaw)

The topic of the presentation will be a codex created in Silesia in the second half of the 15th century, containing the so-called "Wroclaw's Walloon Book" — a collection of guides to places rich in gold, silver, and minerals — as well as a collection of alchemical recipes. The manuscript was kept in Wroclaw until World War II; after the collections were evacuated, it was not returned to the Wroclaw University Library and was long considered lost. Only in recent years it was identified in Berlin's collections, enabling research into its structure and content.

This pocket-sized parchment and paper codex, created as a miscellany, combines texts from various sources, revealing the mosaic of late medieval Silesia and the flow of ideas among its intellectual elites. The content of the "Wroclaw's Walloon Book" provides a unique testimony to contemporary knowledge about the mineral wealth of the Sudetes, as well as medieval mining practices and methods of describing spatial characteristic of the era. The collection of alchemical works, meanwhile, reveals previously unknown avenues of interest among monastic and courtly circles, who dreamed of discovering new deposits and explored the art of transmuting metals into gold.

The meeting will be led by Dr. hab. Dagmara Adamska, professor at the University of Wrocław (UoW's Institute of History) – supervisor of the research of mgr Sabina Kwiecień.

23.03.2026
4:00 p.m.
Room No. 4, level 0, Wroclaw University Library
We cordially invite you!

Registration link:
https://forms.office.com/e/20b99DYkwS?origin=lprLink