Szwarc, Schwarzenberg or Czerny? Heraldic Memory of the Polish Nobility from the Middle Ages to the Present: The Case of the Czerny Family

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The author needs to work on their organization and give greater background to their research so that the general reader of _Genealogy_ can know what is going on. See my other comments.

Thank you for the work that you have done to produce this manuscript. It has some potential. I have some general suggestions followed by individual editing questions/recommendations.

As I am not an expert in heraldry and I doubt that most readers will be experts either, you need to give a background at the beginning of the paper of the practice of using coats of arms in Poland and the connections it has had to family identities and genealogies, particularly among the higher classes.

Could you include a map of the area(s) in the Poland sphere where this family has been particularly influential?

As I mention below, the flow of the analysis is hard to follow at times. Please consider your organization by giving outlines and summaries within each section. A figure showing the different people involve would also help.

I am a little unclear of whether you are talking about one family or two at the beginning. The Szwarc and Czerny identities need some clarification on how they became associated with one family in the end.

Could you include a chart showing the different initial individuals that are identified as early family members and their descendants mentioned in the text?

References - At several points I mention that you should have a citation to support your supposition. Please make sure that you add these and others where you are not relying on your conclusions. When you are relying on your own analysis, please explicitly say so.

Conclusion - How can your analysis inform other studies of coats of arms and heraldry within families in Europe and perhaps elsewhere? Thing of how your study can go beyond being a localized analysis to one that has broader application.

L. 6 - “Polish” Czerny family
L. 27 - “The family represents”
L. 30 - What is the Nowina coat of arms? Explain before discussing it further. No doubt others know what it was, but I don’t know.
L. 35 - Is there one “legend” or multiple “legends?”
L. 37 - You speak of “sporadic” studies on heraldic memory, but give no examples. Please add what examples there are here.
L. 45 - Who were the people with the “Szwarc” last name? Were they Polish, German, or some other nationality?
L. 48 - What was the year of the “municipal admission registers” you reference here?
L 50 - 52 - Here you need to give more background on both the Bozezdarz and Czarny coats of arms and their associated families. You jump right into it without helping the reader know the context.
L. 61  - Explain what is entailed by being “given enoblement” to use the coat of arms by Jerzy’s descendants.
L. 75 - Remind the reader of the Szwarc family connection to Jerzy.
L. 76 - “significant in considerations” Should this be “significant in consideration?” 
L. 90 - Give the names of Jan’s two sons right here.
L. 102 - Tell more about the “Morsztyn and Bethmann families.” Also, give a reference here.
L. 118 - This is information that needs to be near the beginning in abbreviated form.
L. 162 - “and that the family continued Nowina’s illustrious martial deeds.”
L. 172 - What was the “expedition to Vienna?”

Sections 2.3 - 2.4   These areas need better organization as the logic is harder to follow. Perhaps you can introduce the outline of what you are analyzing at the beginning of 2.3 and 2.4 and then summarize at the end of each. I have not attempted to give you specific editing suggestions through most of this.

L 311 - What do you mean by “precise form of the Schwarzenberg arms?”
L. 321 - Where is “the Sandomierz region?”    
L. 345 - 346 - Need a source on what the Szwarc family was doing at this time and who some of the individuals in the family were.
L. 386 “relatively few errors were committed in this account.”  Who analyzed the genealogy to check for errors? Give a source.

L. 456 - “Czerny Family of Poland”

Author Response

Thank you for your valuable comments. Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This is a well-written and well-argued paper. Although the author carries it forward into the 20th century and thus deals with a different time period, it brings to mind  Constance Bouchard's 2010 Those of My Blood: Creating Noble Families in Medieval Francia. As Bouchard demonstrates, genealogies are as often about the pursuit of legitimacy and power as they are about cataloging familiar relations. If the author is unfamiliar with this work, I would suggest they give it a read. 

The section about Jan Kmita's Phoenix on lines 144-159 is particularly interesting. This sounds like something that could be worth further exploration, if the author is looking for a next project. 

Author Response

Thank you for your valuable comments. Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Thank you for making those revisions. The paper has improved substantially. You still may not realize how confusing it is to keep all the different terms straight. You removed my suggestion of "Polish" Czerny family, which is fine, but I was seeking to understand the geographical area of these families. Your revised introduction does help. However, a table with all your family names/terms on one column with their corresponding meanings/other information on the other column, would help immensely. 

 

When I was asking about the Nowina coat of arms, I was not asking what it looks like as you had the picture there, but what I was asking is what it is "all about." Your additional background material helps, but you need to say more about what coats of arms signify and why they are important in the context of your paper. What would happen if you didn't talk about coats or arms at all in this paper? They don't seem to be that crucial, from my perspective. Perhaps you need to better emphasize why you include them at all, so your paper can appeal to a broader audience than experts in your field. 

Finally, I recommend that you have someone read this paper who is not an expert in your field and see what they suggest to you to make it more readable.

Author Response

Thank you very much for your comments. I must admit that after the first review (specifically the part concerning the readability of the article for people unfamiliar with heraldry), the original version of the article was read by a physicist, who had a few suggestions (which I incorporated into the introduction and conclusion), but none of them indicated that the article was unclear to readers with no background in history at all.
Information about coats of arms is essential because the entire 20th-century account preserved by the family’s descendants is based on a heraldic legend most likely originating in the 14th century. In fact, the whole story of Czerny saving Schwarzenberg at Vienna (17th century) was a reworking of the legendary tale of Nowina from the heraldic narrative, as I clearly state in the article. In this sense, coats of arms are crucial to the paper, because without them we lose sight of why the Czerny family so readily referred to heroic military deeds, even though practically no one in the family participated in military operations (apart from Mikołaj and Michał).
As members of the Nowina clan—bearing the Nowina coat of arms—they felt almost obliged to prove themselves on the battlefield, and since they were unable to do so, they began to fabricate their past. Regarding the ennoblement of the Szwarc family, the coat of arms is also key here: the Czerny family “appropriated” a lineage with documented ennoblement in order to demonstrate an older pedigree, which is a common practice among European noble families.
I have also attached a simplified genealogical table of the Czerny family and added a few sentences to highlight the importance of heraldry in genealogical research.