The website presents online exhibition of documents “Legal foundations of administration in Belarusian lands in 14th-18th centuries”

The website presents online exhibition of documents “Legal foundations of administration in Belarusian lands in 14th-18th centuries”.

On display are juridical documents created in different states that existed on Belarusian ethnic lands in the 14th through the 18th centuries: the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Russian Empire. Among these are the Acts of national and local importance, documents concerning rights of individual persons and relating to church matters, Statutes of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Privileges of the Magdeburg Law conferring self-government on towns and boroughs, etc.

The exposition shows over 470 records (textual documents, photographs, maps, archival editions, published material) selected from five Belarusian archives – the Belarusian State Archives-Museum of Literature and Art, the National Historical Archives of Belarus in Minsk, the National Historical Archives of Belarus in Grodno, the Belarusian State Archives of Films, Photographs and Sound Recordings, and the Belarusian Research Center of Electronic Records.

The bulk of the exposition are textual records – mainly manuscripts, as well as typescripts and printed documents (original exemplars and 19th-century copies) in Belarusian, Old Belarusian, Polish, Russian and Latin languages.