In 1778 Sigismund Justus Ehrhardt, the Lutheran scholar of Silesian religious history, described the persecution of beguines and beghards in the fourteenth century and remarked briefly on the activities of the papal inquisitor, John of Schwenkenfeld. The source of his knowledge of this matter was an inscription located in the Dominican Church of the Holy Cross in Świdnica (Schweidnitz). From this it transpired that John of Schwenkenfeld, an inquisitor in the dioceses of Wrocław (Breslau) and Lubusz (Lebus), conducted ‘a famous trial against the Hooded Sisters, women belonging to the beghard sect’. In 1862 Ehrhardt's brief comment regarding the trial of the Świdnica moniales Capuciatae (‘Hooded Nuns’) was repeated by Wilhelm Wattenbach, the eminent publisher of sources relating to the medieval history of Silesia. However, neither of the German historians was familiar with any material concerning Schwenkenfeld's inquisitorial activities or connected directly with the case against the Świdnica beguines.

A quarter of a century after Wattenbach's publication, the Cracow Chapter archivist and director of the episcopal archive, Fr Ignacy Polkowski (1833–88), happened upon a copy of the records of John of Schwenkenfeld's 1332 interrogations during his cataloguing of the collections of the Cracow Cathedral Chapter, a task which he had been carrying out since 1878. He shared his discovery with Dr Bolesław Ulanowski (1860–1919), who soon identified the material he had been shown as a record of the trial mentioned by the inscription that had existed at one time in the Świdnica Church of the Holy Cross. In the introduction to his edition of the Cracow text, Ulanowski wrote: ‘at the time I managed to find the complete text of a notary record of the interrogation of witnesses by John of Schwenkenfeld in Świdnica in 1332. At that time John was an inquisitor of heretical depravity and naturally also a member of the Dominican Order’. The learned Cracow historian informed his readers concisely of the circumstances in which the text was discovered, writing that ‘the codex is the property of the Cracow Chapter and for the opportunity to use it I am grateful to the exceptional kindness of Canon Polkowski who, as he brings order to the library entrusted into his care, is forever finding something new within his treasure house’.