Straipsnyje apžvelgiama Lietuvos mokslų akademijos Vrublevskių bibliotekos Retų spaudinių skyriuje saugoma ediktų kolekcija (1 345 fizinių vienetų (771 pavadinimas)), trumpai apibūdinama jos atsiradimo Bibliotekoje istorija, aptariamos jos ypatybės turinio, kalbos ir chronologijos atžvilgiu.
The article offers an overview of a collection of 16th–20th-century printed edicts issued by the Prussian authorities and kept in the Rare Book Department of the Wroblewski Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences. We touch upon the history behind the collection’s arrival to the Library, which goes back to expeditions sent by the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences to the Kaliningrad region with the purpose to collect books and other documents from the ruins of destroyed libraries and estates and bring them to Lithuania. The article discusses specific features of the collections from the aspect of content, language and chronology. All the edicts in the collection (1345 items, 771 title) are of secular content, they contain numerous economic, legal and domestic concepts and sayings, and are an excellent testimony to the social system and everyday life of those times. A majority of these publications are in German (564 titles), some are in Lithuanian (94 titles), Polish (114 titles) and Russian (2 titles). Some of them contain parallel text in two or three languages. The oldest Lithuanian-language edict (E-675) is the one issued by Georg Friedrich (1539–1603), the Duke of Prussia and printed in 1589 in the printing house of Georg Osterberger (Königsberg). It is worthy of note that 63 of the Lithuanian-language edicts are unique or at least very rare, they may be found only in the holdings of the Wroblewski Library. The entire collection is registered in the Library’s electronic catalogue under the call number E-* and accessible to the readers.
