Letters, postal services and law in Early Modern Europe

Several scholarly projects have created online access, in repertories or digital versions, to Early Modern letters, in particular for a number of famous writers and scholars. Less attention seems to go to mail delivery in Early Modern Europe. Lately I encountered the research blog of Eric Vanzieleghem (Brussels) who charts French legislation on postal services from the fourteenth century onwards, focusing in particular on postal services during the Enlightenment. By chance I also spotted the website of a research project about Early Modern itineraries and travel guide books aiming at gaining more insight into networks connecting European towns and people. In my view it is fruitful to look at both projects together in a single contribution. A book with images and transcriptions of Dutch letters from many centuries gave me the final push to start this post.

You’ve got mail

Choosing correspondences as a subject goes clearly against the trend of the hyperquick social media and the continuous instant arrival of bits of information at our computers and mobile phones. Letters with their sheer length, the impatience of waiting for the postman to arrive, and the sense of expectation when opening a closed envelope have become rare. To be honest, I like to delve into Early Modern letters, but as a legal historian I hesitated to express this interest! Physical post might be less important now, but we all want to be kept posted on developments, and bloggers keep posting their contributions.

A look at the blog directory of the Hypotheses blog network earlier this year brought me to the blog Histoire du courrier dans l’Europe des Lumières created by Eric Vanzieleghem. Research concerning the letters of Condorcet led him in 2022 to start investigating legislation about postal services in Early Modern France. Vanzieleghem rightly started with defining the main concepts concerning post and postal services, and before I knew it he had me hooked in. The French word courrier was first used to refer to the actual carrier of letters, while nowadays it means the entirety of packages, written and printed matters send by post. The word poste literally stems from the stations where one could change horses. It referred to the distance between them and the network of these posts. Only since the nineteenth century its meaning changed into the desigination of state or private postal services. Vanzieleghem promises us an arricle about the eighteenth-century ferme générale des postes, and this office brings us close to the French government and administration during the Ancien Régime.

Until now Eric Vanzieleghem has published only six posts. One of them gives you the text of a royal ordinance from 1673 which adjusted postal regulations after the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle (1668) and the Treaty of the Pyrenees (1673). I found in particular the tariff for postal service in force between 1703 and 1759 very interesting. It deals both with French regions and with a number of European postal routes. The payments due for a trajectory changed markedly when passing through particular towns. Part of the reasons behind these differences stem clearly form the very itinerary you letter had to go. In the second section of this post itineraries and travel guides will come into view.

Vanzieleghem gives us a list of the eighteenth-century correspondences used for his research. Both online versions of well-known corresponces fiugure here, buyt alo some very recently edited letters of more unfamiliar persons. He alerts to the recent discovery at the National Archives, Kew, of 75 letters written in 1757 and 1758 captured from the French navy.

His page on legislation is of course a key element for my posts. Van Zieleghem righly looks far and wide to find royal ordinances from 1315 onwards and revolutionary legislation upto 1801. The famous Receuil général des anciennes lois françaises (…) edited by François-André Isambert and others (29 vol., Paris, 1821-1833) does not contain every relevant ordinance until 1789. The Receuil d’Isambert is available online among the digitized legislative resources in the section Essentiels du droit of Gallica. The chronological list does not (yet) contain references for every ordinance in it, let alone links to digitized editions, but there is a brief overview of the main resources used sofar. It seems Vanzieleghem has found a lot of revolutionary decrees and laws, but he does not refer to the online Décrets et Lois 1789-1795: Collection Baudouin and La loi de la Révolution Française 1789-1799 on which you find information here in a post I wrote in 2022.

At the page Références of his blog Vanzieleghem offers a bibliography with several sections. Apart from scholarly literature for France he mentions a few titles for Italy and Switzerland. He also includes a list with a number of Early Modern books about letters and postal services, some of them with links to digitized versions. Vanzieleghem has either made a very strict selection of works or he has not (yet) used the online Bibliographie d’histoire du droit en langue française (Université de Lorraine, Nacy-Metz), searchable in French and English. For the maritime postal services he has found more titles than currently present in this online bibliography.

Early Modern itineraries and digital humanities

The research project Early Modern Digital Itineraries (EmDigit) is led by Rachel Midura (Virginia Tech). Her project team aims at mapping itineraries in Early Modern travel guide books on maps, using these data to build a project in the field of spatial history. Midura explains the aim of EmDigit using as an example a rare early Italian edition, Poste diverse d’Italia, Alemagna, Spagna, e Francia (Milan, [1550]). This edition is not recorded in EDIT16 and the Universal Short Title Catalogue; the union catalogue of the Servizio Bibliotecario Nazionale does not mention any copy of it in Italy. The only known copy has been digitized in full color by the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, however, with currently as inferred date of publication around 1620. This change of seventy years came possibly after comparison with a copy of the edition Milan 1647 held at the library of Munich University, but more probably in view of the activity in and around 1622 of the Milanese printer Nava as shown in the Heritage of the Printed Book Database. The HPB database currently repeats the date around 1550 for the book Midura presents at EmDigit. I will look here at other elements and arguments for datation of this rare book.

Title page of the Poste diverse d’Italia – copy Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, Rar. 1075 – image source: BSB

The book gives the distances between cities, adverts you about the differences in length of the mile in countries, and contains detailed information about the dates of European year markets, a concise pilgrim’s guide for the Holy Land, and the dates of the weekly departure and delivery of mail for particular itineraries. Midura plotted the resulting data on a map of Europe. As for internal evidence for the date of production of this work, on pages 15 and 26 it is stated Vienna is the current residence of the imperial court, which suggests 1529 as a terminus post quem or the period after 1620. Maybe Midura has been misled by the black-and-white version available online in Google Books with the old datation 1550 given in 2014. It seems she simply did not check the bibliographical information at its ultimate source. Luckily Midura provides at GitHub a PDF with a very substantial list of printed itinerary books between 1545 and 1747. This list provides you with a basis to add further works, for example more translations of some of the works mentioned. Midura points to two editions of a Dutch translation of Georg Kranitz’ Delitiae Italiae. Works in Dutch can be traced using the Short-Title Catalogue Netherlands (STCN), now online at the CERL platform.

Midura noted on January 1, 2024 in the ReadMe document and the GitHub startpage of EmDigit the problem with the datation of the Poste diverse edition; she opts for a datation around 1700. She does not mention the new date around 1620 proposed by the librarians in Munich, and she points to just a single other digitized itinerary held at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. An online search in the Karlsruher Virtueller Katalog – with a search interface in German and English – will quickly bring you to more relevant digitized works held at this library and elsewhere.

The bibliography by Madura shows very clearly some titles took over advertising claims from other books, and perhaps even more for their contents. The GitHub page of Midura for EmDigit gives you access to the various digital components of the map with the postal routes. The spatial dimensions of the post routes in Early Modern Europe are certainly clear, but their presence in any particular short period needs further elaboration and some basic work, starting with using more printed itineraries and widening also the list of secondary scholarly literature. Midura tells you more about her project in the article ‘Itinerating Europe: Early Modern Spatial Networks in Printed Itineraries, 1545–1700’, Journal of Social History 54/4 (2021) 1023–1063. Midura was also involved in developing a transcribing model for Transkribus, Italian administrative hands 1550-1770. In a period of 150 years Europe changed drastically, if only becaure of long wars, and thus it is vital to locate information both in space and time. Midura uses some eighty itineraries for her project.

The EmDigit team organizes in 2024 several workshops. Midura announces on X (Twitter) she is going to publish her study The Tassis Family and Communications Revolution in Early Modern Europe in open access. I was particular happy to see her announcement, because it can form a bridge to the third and last section of this post around a book on letters from the Netherlands.

Post Scriptum

Letter writing comes in various forms and genres. Recently I was delighted to pick up a copy of a book by Jet Steinz, P.S. Van liefdespost tot hatemail. De 150 opmerkelijkste Nederlandse brieven [P.S. From love letters to hate mail. The 150 most remarkable Dutch letters] (Amsterdam 2019). Steinz found a great way to organize her book and to give it more impact. She organized the letters by genre in chronological order, and she presents each letter with images of the original in full color and a transcription. For older letters she sometimes rephrased the wording for smooth reading in modern Dutch. Letters in foreign languages have been translated. Only the relatively small format (18 by 23 cm) prevents it from truly becoming a kind of palaeographical atlas for late medieval to modern scripts. Apart from letters from famous Dutch people, be they Erasmus, Anthoni van Leeuwenhoek, Rembrandt van Rijn, the brothers Vincent and Theo van Gogh, Anne Frank or Johan Cruyff, numerous letters stem from ordinary people. Letters by famous Dutch writers, often written when they were not yet famous, appear in many genres, even in the section for children’s letters.

With 34 genres Steinz created a wonderful array of moods and aims in letters, bringing emotions from love to hate, anger to happiness, obedience and protest into relief. Sea post, not unfamiliar here from the posts I wrote here about the letters among the Prize Papers in the collection of the High Court of Admiralty held at the National Archives, Kew, figures as the first genre. Letters by prisoneers and letters with threats, letters applying for a job and rejections by firms, letters from scholars and simple notes about household chores show many sides of human life. Steinz brings together letters from many Dutch cultural institutions. She dispensed with exact references to archival collections, thus making it into a nice exercise to trace these meta-data. Steinz redeems this omission with a substantial bibliography of relevant literature about Dutch letters.

Apart from letters captured by enemy navies Steinz used another curious collection of letters which never reached their destiny. Simon de Brienne, a seventeenth-century Dutch postmaster, retained some 2600 undeliverable letters in a chest. After nearly a century in the former Communication Museum, The Hague, these letters and the entire museum collection will move in September 2024 to the main location of Beeld en Geluid [Sound and Vision] in Hilversum, the Dutch national audiovisual museum. The chest and letters were the subject of the independent Brienne research project, now itself part of the international Letterlocking project for creating a typology of ways of sealing letters, and for tracing and reading unopened letters using new technologies. At Early Modern Letters Online (EMLO) you can find the catalogue of the letters within the Brienne collection and references to the research about them. It is touching to see in Steinz’ book letters of prisoners among these undelivered letters. Yet another lifeline had been locked for them.

In her foreword Steinz gave a place of honor to Francisco de Tassis (1459-1517), the founder of the first European postal service. I could not help remembering only the Thurn und Taxis family in Regensburg, but they are indeed connected with this man. I readily admit that when looking at Vanzieleghem’s blog I was surprised to read in an old French manual for legal history about the postal service of the university of Paris. Its monopoly ended in 1719. Vanzieleghem could not yet find the first royal ordinance issued in 1383 about the postal role of this university which from then on should serve each French diocese.

To me it seems definitely fitting the themes in this post are connected with each other in some way. It will do no harm to compare postal tariffs with printed itineraries. It is also clear spatial history needs a sure foundation on historical research. Letters and postal services vitally connected and connect people just as much as the internet does since a few decades. In Italian legge (laws) and leghe (miles) might look rather similar, and indeed they are not miles apart from each other. Legislation concerning letters and post deserves due attention from legal historians.

An addendum

A good starting point for researching Early Modern postal services is the chapter by Nikolaus Schobesberger et alii, ‘European postal networks’, in: News networks in early Modern Europe, Joad Raymond and Noah Moxham (eds.) (Leiden-Boston, 2016; online in open access) 19-63. This chapter suggests for example the inclusion of key postal stations in the Holy Roman Empire at certain moments can help to date the moment of creation of the contents in printed itineraries. It is good to see both this article and Midura point to Ottavio Codogno’s Nuouo itinerario delle poste per tutto il mondo (Milan 1608) as a very important source.

In the PDF version of the Munich copy of the Poste diverse the date of publication is still indicated as 1550. At p.15 it is also stated the emperor lived sometimes in Prague, altre volte vi abitava la Maestà Cesarea, referring either to the period in the fourteenth century or to the period between 1583 and 1620.

Maps for legal history, a German example

When creating an article or even a blog post creating a mind map can be most helpful. Using maps to represent information about legal history or historic events and developments with a legal dimension can help you to see legal history in a wider perspective. This month Klaus Graf kindly alerted me at Archivalia to a German project with legal maps, Rechtskarten, the fruit of a cooperation between nine legal historians at a number of German universities. They aim at presenting an atlas touching on both legal and cultural history. Its current dimensions are still modest, but in my view thsi project can inspire other scholars to use or create maps for legal history, too. Somehow this project escaped my attention earlier on…

A variety of maps

The navigation of Rechtskarten is fairly simple. You can use the tabs for maps, authors, keywords (Stichwortregister) and timelines (Zeittafeln). Currently only sixteen subjects are presented, but their numbering shows at least one hundred subjects are in preparation. Thus it seems you should not worry too much about the fact four out of sixteen themes deal with the twentieth century. The earliest item concerns the Kaufunger Wald, a royal wood since the eight century until the late eleventh centuy. In this item created by Wilhelm A. Eckhardt the maps shown are both modern and old. The section Orte (locations) brings you to an interactive map guiding you to its exact location in the north of the modern Bundesland Hessen, to the north east of Kassel.

Wilhelm A. Eckhardt looks at legal iconography and legal ethnology in another contribution on village court locations in Hessen. Among the images is a photograph from the legal icongraphic collection of Karl Frölich held at and digitized by the Max-Planck-Institut für Rechtsgeschichte und Rechtstheorie in Frankfurt am Main. I discussed the background and possible use of this collection in an earlier post (2015). In that post I mentioned already the LAGIS portal for the regional history of Hessen with a section on these Gerichtstätten. Eckhardt righly mentions this in the bibliography to his article, with the latest item in it dating from 2013. The original land registry maps for Hessen (Urkataster) can be searched online at the LAGIS portal, too.

Land registry map (Katasterkarte) of Reichensachsen in Hessen with a linden tree indicating the location of the village court, 1788 – image source Staatsarchiv Marburg, Karte B 234, photo by B. Krippner

Among the items for the twentieth century i was a bit disappointed when I saw the media for the German Democratic Republic (1949-1990). I had expected some maps of the former DDR, but Hans Hattenhauer only added three diagrams touching the organization of this state, in itself surely enlightening and useful, but not the kind of map you would expect. In his contribution Hattenhauer concisely shows the low position of law and lawyers with the DDR. This item is in a way rather close to using a mind map. The visualisation of in this case state organization can be very telling.

Mapping some subjects has progressed clearly since the start of this project, somewhere between 2000 and 2015; information about the background and start of Rechtskarten is lacking, but Jörn Eckert died in 2006. The articles on the foundation of universities in the Holy Roman Empire (Armin Wolf) and the coming of printing to Europe (Jörg Wolff) share the same map, and it is instructive to compare the presence of universities with the advance of printing presses. The Atlas of Early Printing (University of Iowa) does a better job in many respects. You can easily add a layer showing university towns to the interactive map. The question about universities and early printing remains certainly valuable.

It is rather strange that the interesting article on maps of the Holy Roman Empire and the perception of minor states by Armin Wolf lacks any image of the maps under discussion. Is German copyright here the problem or have the Rechtskarten simply been abandonded at some point? Anyway, updating articles is in some cases clearly needed. The bibliography for the article by Jörg Wolff concerning the Tractatus de fluminibus seu Tyberiadis of Bartolus de Saxoferrato (1313/1314-1357) mentions only literature in German until 1999. By the way, this is one of the three subjects within this project not exclusively connected with German legal history. Armin Wolf’s contribution on the partitions of Poland in the eighteenth century as to some extent dynastic partitions lacks any map, image or location. The word Theatrum in the title of the work he discussed helped me to remember the project Welt und Wiissen auf der Bühne. Theatrum-Literatur der Frühen Neuzeit of the Herzog-August-Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel presented here in 2015.

Some musings

Sometimes things go differently than originally planned. Not every project succeeds, and though we all preach that you should learn from your faults and failures more often we hide them or try to forget about them. The Rechtskarten are in my view clearly an unfinished project, and not a failure. It is easy to point at shortcomings and omissions in this interesting pilot for a project with maps for legal history. I think the Rechtskarten can be revitalized. In fact it is a good exercise to come up with proposals for additions, corrections and updates. Some maps are now even only handwork. Only the articles on early printing and the foundation of universities belong to the field of cultural history. Many items lack a timetable, but the use of diagrams is an asset. The inclusion of some interactive maps is a sign this project certainly aimed – when feasible – at using modern tools. It would be great to have similar websites concerning subjects for other countries or regions, and I am sure you know some examples.

I had planned to open this year with other posts, but these I not have yet completed. Looking at an unfinished project with the potential to inspire others to create similar maps for their own field of interest seemed a wise thing to do!

Early Modern risks at sea and legal history

Transporting goods by ship is a risky business, certainly without modern forms of insurance. In the Early Modern period European merchants, sailors and traders developed a number of ways to mitigate the costs of damage at sea. In the European project Average-Transaction Costs and Risk Management during the First Globalization (Sixteenth-Eighteenth Centuries) (AveTransRisk) of the Centre for Maritime Historical Studies at the University of Exeter one particular solution comes into view. Interestingly, aspects of legal history come very much into view within this project with maritime history as its core. One of the many results of this project came unexpectedly for me into view, thus bringing a welcome chance to present it here and to look at some of its aspects.

An international project

The ERC-funded project AveTransRisk is led by Maria Fusaro, director of the centre in Exeter and also leader for the other major project of the centre, Sailing into modernity. The project aims at gaining insight into legal institutions helping to divide among parties the risks of costs due to damage during a voyage at sea. As a means to achieve this objective the legal construction of general average forms the focal point of the historical investigation of the large project team. For this project data were collected for the period 1500-1800 from five countries with a large shipping trade: England, France, Italy, the Low Countries and Spain.

A major result of this project is a database accompanied by a glossary and introductions to the source materials. These introductions come with examples of voyages and a filter to select these voyages directly. For Italy sources from Genoa and Tuscany are used. Pisa and Livorno are the two Tuscan ports in this section. The inclusion of Malta is most welcome, even though in this case the nineteenth century is the research period. For France the focus is on the Royal Insurance Chamber, in existence between 1668 and 1689. In the case of Spain the main source of information for this projet is the Casa de la Contratación in Seville. I will discuss some of the example voyages, but I encourage you to investigate these introductions and examples yourself.

Alas currently similar introductions for the two main ports of the Low Countries in the Early Modern period are not yet present, nor have data been entered into the current version of the database, and the same is the case for England. For Antwerp I cannot give you quick guidance except pointing you to the Felixarchief, and to publications by two members of the Exeter team, Gijs Dreijer and Dave de ruysscher. At my blog I discussed in 2014 a number of Dutch and Flemish examples of municipal courts led by aldermen, among them the schepenen of Amsterdam dealing with “Assurantiën, Averijen en Zeezaken” and the resources at the Stadsarchief Amsterdam for studying this tribunal. Luckily, this archive explains itself – only in Dutch – the nature of the averijgrossen for the period 1700-1810 in its holdings, with illustrations, references to other relevant archival records and resoiurces such as digitized newspapers, and examples of some cases. Some 10,000 cases can be searched online using an index leading you directly also to scans of the acts. This is a major difference with the situation in 2013 at the launch of this index. I suppose this information concerning Amsterdam will in some form appear eventually also at the website of the project in Exeter.

Cornelis Mahu (Antwerp, 1613-1689), Ships in a storm near a rocky coast – painting, Staatliche Museen Schwerin – image source: RKD, The Hague, https://rkd.nl/explore/images/12498

In happy cooperation Gijs Dreijer and I contributed an article about an Early Modern legal treatise on average by Quintyn Weytsen to a volume about important Dutch legal works since 1500, ‘Een tractaet van avarien – 1617 – Quintyn Weytsen (1517-1564)’, in: Juristen die schreven en bleven. Nederlandstalige rechtsgeleerde klassiekers, G. Martyn, L. Berkvens and P. Brood (eds.) (Hilversum 2020) 38-41 (also online, Pro Memorie 21/1 (2019) (PDF)). Weytsen’s treatise was often reprinted. In Amsterdam the Kamer van Assurantie en Averij referred to it, and it influenced also customary law in Antwerp. We had liked to add to our article an image of the impressive painting shown here above, but this was not possible, hence my choice here.

Using the AveTransRisk database

It is time to look more closely at the database. Of course there is at the start an example of the way general average was calculated. The vessel, the freight and cargo were all taken into consideration. It helps you to see how costs for damage would become substantially lower than without this legal precaution. The general free search mode of the database allows fuzzy search results. The advanced search mode helps you greatly for many kinds of questions. You can add and remove text fields and choice fields at will. With a choice filed you can select from a dropdown menu with a wide range of categories, and also restrict your search to one or more archives.

The range of fields to choose from is truly luxurious. The advanced search guide does lists and explains the various field types. You can check for particular weather conditions, and for all kind of measures. This helps you also to refine or reframe your own research aims. The guide indicates you can only enter for French records the insurance date, and only for Spanish records the trials section is available. Some of the query results, the ports involved and the events during a voyage can be shown also on a map. You can copy and print your results, or export them as a CSV file, Excel or PDF.

The database offers also six main list overviews: for averages, events, voyages, vessels, masters, and reports. When you select for example in the ports view Dunkerque you get an overview of all voyages mentioning this harbour town long feared by sailors and traders for its pirates. In my opinion it is a good idea to familiarise yourself with the database by using first these lists, and to check at will the information about the voyages in the results. The screenprint here above shows a part of the summary for voyage no. 10016 created from two archival records held at the Archivio di Stato di Pisa. The database allow you to distinguish between ports visited, ports of departure and ports of destination. The locations can be chosen from a dropdown menu, hinting at the obvious need to standardize the names of locations in different languages. For other aspects, too, you can choose the aspect you want to focus on. The maps help you to visualise the voyages and to consider the amount of time a voyage and its aftermath took. The glossary and the table on silver equivalence in currency are most useful, too.

Early Modern shipping news

It is seducing to look at further aspects of this rich database, even when you might have wanted to find now also English, Dutch and Flemish voyages and cases. Of course ports in England, Flanders and the Dutch Republic do figure now, too, in the database. The new thing to highlight in the data available here is the combination of economic, maritime and legal history which mutually enrich each other. It throws new light on Early Modern transport.

The examples adduced as sample data deserve our attention here. Among the example cases for Genoese records is the story of a ship in 1639 first colliding with another vessel while loading (!) and suffering damage by storms at sea (voyage 502297). For cases from Seville just one example is adduced of a voyage in 1585 with damage to the hull of the ship, jettisoned mechandise and angry merchants in court who did not believe the crew’s story (voyage 70011). Here I had expected an example showing one of the typical Spanish flotas, the fleets so typical of Spanish naval voyages. There is a wide range of examples from Tuscany. The Antwerp vessel Corvo Volante – I guess originally named something like the Vlieghende Raef – sailing in 1599 from Brasil with sugar destined for Lisbon had to jettison some of its cargo off the Azores and ended its voyage in Livorno (voyage 10022). A French example adduced by the team cannot be missed here. They mention a voyage in 1670 (no. 92799) from Le Havre to Guinea, hence to the Americas and back to Le Havre, a typical triangle voyage well known in the Transatlantic slave trade, with indeed enslaved persons as its merchandise.

The rich documentation assembled within the database has led the team to a fair stream of publications. The archival background is duly mentioned in the section on datasets. Let’s certainly not forget the fleet of other resources for maritime history brought together by the research centre in Exeter at its website. The guide to naval records in the National Archives, Kew (384 pp., PDF) and its introduction by the centre take for me the palm as something absolutely worth saving whatever your views of the project on general average and its European legal history. The project finally came to my attention again thanks to the transcription model four team members contributed to the Transkribus project for Italian administrative hands (1550-1700), one of just four Italian models now available. As for the Dutch side of these project, it is good to know Sabine Go (Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam) leads hetrself in Amstedam the project Risky Business with Giovanni Ceccarelli and Antonio Iodice in her staff, Maria Fusaro on the advisory board, and some other members of the Exeter team (Dave de ruysscher, Guido Rossi and Lewis Wade) in its wider network.

The interplay between the economy, maritime trade, state regulations and city tribunals are at the heart of the AveTransRisk project. Legal historians can hardly complain about the efforts done here to bring general average into the limelight. The assessment of risks and the calculation of damages shed light on a very real aspect of Early Modern trade and commerce. This project is a contribution to comparative (legal) history helping you to compare for instance between city states and centrally governed countries. They bring the necessary details needed to confirm larger hypotheses in a more sophisticated way. Even now without the records from England, Flanders and the Low Countries the database is most valuable.

I will not hide my vivid interest in the very realistic stories told by people about their sometimes dramatic voyages at sea, or even suffering damage already on loading. They bridge the gap between legal abstractions and court narratives. It is great to have so many archival records now accessible online for anyone wanting to gain insight into general average as a matter of more than average interest for Early Modern and legal historians.

A postscript

You can now learn more about general average and the AveTransRisk project from the volume General Average and Risk Management in Medieval and Early Modern Maritime Business, edited by Maria Fusaro, Andrea Abboddati and Luisa Piccinno (2023), also available online in open access.

Medieval sources for Normandy’s (legal) history

Musing about a possible goal for a holiday this summer France is bound to enter my thoughts! Thus it made me really happy to find a new portal about French regional history with an European dimension. The portal Norécrit. Aus sources de la Normandie. Pratiques de l’écrit das la Normandie médiévale is a project at the Université de Caen Normandie bringing you a tripartite online corpus with sources for legal history, ecclesiastical administration and the history of medieval archives and libraries, in particular for the abbey of Mont Saint-Michel. In earlier posts I looked here at Norman customary law and at the cultural heritage in the form of manuscripts from Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres. What kind of sources can you find at Norécrit? How does the version presented at the new portal differ from earlier (online) editions?

Familiar and unfamiliar

The portal Norécrit came to my attention thanks to the Réseau des médiévistes belges de langue française (RMBLF) which offers a calendar of scholarly events concerning medieval studies in Europe, and much else, too, such as notices about new publications and online projects. Let’s first chart the institutional constellation for Norécrit. The portal is the fruit of a team at the Maison de la Recherche en Sciences Humaines (MRSH), and more specifically its unit Centre Michel de Boüard – CRAHAM (UMR 6273). Earlier on this centre launched in cooperation with numerous other institutions already the Bibliothèque virtuelle du Mont Saint-Michel. You can read more about the CRAHAM also at its blog Les Échos du Craham.

Law in medieval Normandy

The first section of Norécrit is directly concerned with medieval legal history. The équipe for this section is led by the director of CRAHAM, Laurence Jean-Marie. Under the heading Ecrits nomratif et vitalité économique. Les coutumes des villes et des ports you will find nineteen texts with customary law. Those for harbors contain regulations for tolls, they are not just tariff lists. The introduction states clearly we should not expect too much uniformity. Many texts are not official statements, but instead more privately produced text collections. Texts concerning forestry law have not been included. The Grand Coutumier de Normandie is not mentioned at all, since these texts have clearly a more local range. The Coutumes de la prévôté d’Harfleur (1387) is the first text edited at Norécrit, and the edition comes with a useful introduction and a presentation of the sources. A nineteenth-century edition used only one archival source, but here three medieval sources have been used for the new edition. You can browse the text using the sommaire or use the search function (recherche). This section brings a most valuable addition for the study of customary law in Normandy.

Viewing church life in the archdiocese Rouen

Administration par l’écrit dans l’Église du XIIIe siècle is the theme of the second section, led by Grégory Combalbert, and more specifically the development of the use of written records in the archdiocese Rouen covering the territory of Normandy. Three sources brought together here can show you church life during the thirteenth century in great detail. Apart from a pouillé, an overview of parishes in this archdiocese and episcopal acts from four archbishops the main resource here is the famous register of archiepiscopal visitations created by Eudes (Odo) Rigaud, archbishop from 1248 until 1275.

I suppose I am not the only scholar remembering reading about him in the great synthesis of medieval ecclesiastical history by the late Sir Richard William Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (Harmondsworth 1970). The concise introduction to the visitations refers to both old and modern literature about this very active archbishop and his register. The edition by Théodose Bonnin, Regestrum visitationum archiepiscopi Rothomagensis : journal des visites pastorales d’Eude Rigaud, archevêque de Rouen 1248-1269 (Rouen 1852) can be consulted online at Gallica as can also the manuscript Paris, BnF, ms. latin 1245, alas only taken from an old but serviceable microfilm. It is wise to look at the full description of this manuscript at the website of the BnF, too, because it points you to some scholarly articles and the English translation by Sidney M. Brown with an introduction by Jeremiah F. O’Sullivan, The register of Eudes of Rigaud (New York-London 1964).

A page of the pouillé for Rouen, 1236-1306 – Paris, BnF, ms. Latin 11052, fol, 5v – image source: Paris, BnF

The document with an overview of parishes in the archdiocese Rouen between 1236 and 1306, too, is preserved in a manuscript held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Ms. Latin 11052). Léopold Delisle published an edition of the text, ‘Polyptychum Rotomagensis dioecesis’, in: Recueil des historiens des Gaules et de la France XXIII (Paris, 1876) pp. 228-331. The manuscript has been digitized in full color at Gallica, and you can find a succinct description in the online Archives et manuscrits catalog of the BnF.

Acts of four archbishops of Rouen between 1231 and 1275 form the third and last element in this section. Currently only acts up to 1257 are presented in the online edition. For some acts of Eudes Rigaud copies are found in his register. The edition contains both the texts of original charters and of later copies. The critical apparatus and annotation are all you can desire. It has to be noted that some seventy acts of the 154 acts stem from Eudes Rigaud. This Franciscan scholar and archbishop was clearly in many ways exceptional, but even when you acknowledge the bias caused by his zealous personality he remains most remarkable.

The archives and libraries of monasteries

The third axe of the project at the Université de Caen is led by Marie Bisson and focuses on one particular and very singular abbey, the Benedictine abbey under royal protection of the Mont Saint-Michel. The projected corpus of texts at Norécrit has not yet been completed. As for now you will find liturgical texts, followed by De abbatibus, the chronicle written by abbot Robert de Torigni about earlier abbots, and a subsection with sources concerning miracles happening at or touching Mont Saint-Michel. In a later phase of the project a corpus of texts written and reunited by Dom Thomas Le Roy in 1647 and 1648 will be published, and also the Constitutiones abbatiae Sancti Michaelis (1258) and statutes issued by pope Gregory IX. The constitutions will be edited from the manuscript Avranches, BM, 214, f. 9-16, and the papal statutes are at fol. 8-9 of this manuscript which you can view online in the Bibliothèque virtuelle du Mont Saint-Michel. In fact you will find there a description of this manuscript and already the incipits and explicits. It would be helpful if the French team provides this link at Norécrit, too. As an excuse for not doing this they can point to the online journal Tabularia. Sources écrits des mondes normands médiévaux with in the 2019 issue a critical edition of De abbatibus with translations in English and Italian by Pierre Bouet, Marie Bisson and others [‘Écrire l’histoire des abbés du Mont Saint-Michel 3. Édition critique et traduction’]. As a bonus they can point to the blog Mondes nordidiques et normands médiévaux.

Three windows on medieval Normandy

After creating the Bibliothèque virtuell du Mont Saint-Michel with numerous digitized manuscripts, most of them held at Avranches, it is not by coincidence this abbey figures large, too, at the new Norécrit portal. Its preeminence simply cannot be denied, but the portal helps to create a more balanced view in the two other sections. It is is splendid to see customary law at a local and municipal level, thus helping to place the Grand Coutumier de Normandie in its original context. In the Bibliothèque David Hoüard, Bibliothèque numérique de droit normand you can find numerous digitized resources concerning law in Normandy from the Middle Ages onwards. You might want to look also at the blog for the project RIN CONDÉ  (Constitution d’un Droit européen : six siècles de coutumiers normands). By the way, Gallica has among its Essentiels du droit a fine section with books and medieval manuscripts around the Coutume de Normandie. The second section of Norécrit brings together precious and interesting sources on medieval church administration and canon law. When searching for synodal statutes from Rouen you can find fourteen texts from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in the Corpus synodalium created at Stanford University.

The connections between Normandy and England, and the position of this duchy within France are obvious reasons for looking at Normandy as a region with European importance already in the medieval period. Hopefully my brief introduction to Norécrit and references to some accompanying projects and blogs helps you to put Normandy into perspective as more than just a lovely region for a summer holiday in France!

A postscript

At the CRAHAM Grégory Combalbert has created an online edition for acts of the bishops of Évreux from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Actes des évêques d’Évreux (xi^e siècle-1223), surely worth mentioning here, too. You can view also images of these charters and acts.

Getting close to medieval papal registers

Even when you are interested in totally different subjects in medieval history emperors, kings and popes attract your attention. Their power and authority make them a natural focus for research, also because the most powerful people and institutions leave a rich track in archival records and manuscripts. Upheavals such as wars, fires and revolutions destroyed parts of this legacy in parchment and paper, but a massive amount of information has survived five or more centuries. The papal curia is rightly seen as one of the earliest and most active medieval bureaucracies. In 2019 the Vatican archives received a new name, Archivio Apostolico Vaticano (AAV) instead of the familiar Archivio Segreto Vaticano, a term which could led people to believe enormous secrets still await discovery. In my view the sheer number of documents, the challenge of languages, medieval scripts and intricate legal matters form the real barrier for abundant use of this archive in a class of its own. In this post I will look at the ways medieval papal registers are now made accessible in print and online. However, it is necessary and useful, too, to look also at least briefly at ways to find documents held at the AAV.

This post is also meant as a salute to the upcoming XVIth International Congress of Medieval Canon Law, to be held at St. Louis, MO, from July 17 to 23, 2022, and as a service to anyone interested in studying pivotal documents for the study of papal history and medieval canon law. For a real understanding of the documents mentioned here it will not do to merely having a glance at them, you will need to immerse yourself into them, and this will enrich you.

In this post the focus will be on access to the original documents, and much less on projects with databases for papal documents. A number of databases and projects for medieval charters is presented in a recent post.

Finding papal registers from the Middle Ages

Two years ago I stated in a post about digital resources rather flatly you cannot find any online inventory at the website of the AAV. This was not entirely true. In fact the four series of medieval papal registers are the very exception to my observation. I had better give you immediately the links to the inventories for these series:

– Registra Avenioniensia (RA) 1-349
– Registra Lateranensia (RL) 1-138 / 498-534 / 925-1126, 1128
– Registra Supplicationum (RS) 1-265 / 479 – 509 / 961-1169
– Registra Vaticana (RV) 1-545 / 772-884

These inventories can be found in the section for publications of the AAV website. I had not realized that the lists with the contents of the four cd-rom sets give you in fact at least a partial inventory of these registers. The cd-roms are only available at research libraries and cannot be accessed worldwide online. You will notice with me these four inventories seemingly do not list all registers of the four series, and I will come back to this fact quickly. For your convenience the overview of papal registers in chronological order by pope from Innocent III to Benedict XIII offered by the Centre Pontifical d’Avignon is very useful.

The modern editions of papal registers from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries form the core of the subscription-only online resource Ut per litteras apostolicas hosted by Brepols. The overview of the Brepolis resources portal gives you a useful concise list of the modern editions published by French scholars since the late nineteenth century. In a period with no or very limited physical access to libraries I felt hard pressed to find a list of these editions in print. My copy of Raoul van Caenegem and François Ganshof, Encyclopedie van de geschiedenis der middeleeuwen (Ghent 1962) is a bit old. This first edition in Dutch contains relevant information at pages 211 to 215. Somewhat newer is my copy of Winfried Baumgart, Bücherverzeichnis zur deutschen Geschichte. Hilfsmittel-Handbücher-Quellen (12th ed., Munich 1997) with information on pages 170 to 173. The information given by Olivier Guyotjeannin, Jacques Pycke and Benoît-Michel Tock (eds.), Diplomatique médiévale (Turnhout 1993) at pp. 333-338 contains less details for the two major French edition series, but the editors send you rightly to the book of Thomas Frenz, Papsturkunden des Mittelalters und der Neuzeit (Stuttgart 1986).

On April 24, 2021 Yvonne Searle published a valuable post with links to various resources with editions of medieval papal documents. The editions of papal registers from the thirteenth and fourteenth century form just a section of her contribution. For these editions she points mainly to digitized versions in the Internet Archive and the Hathi Trust Digital Library. I hesitated to add here for a number of these registers links to Gallica and Princeton Theological Commons, but it would have been repeating a job already sufficiently well done.

Not only for English readers you might sooner or later, but preferably as soon as possible turn to the guide by the late Leonard Boyle, A survey of the Vatican Archives and of its medieval holdings (Toronto 1972; new edition 2001). Almost seventy pages of this book deal with medieval papal registers. Even a cursory reading of these pages should make you aware of the danger of any superficial approach of these registers. The general remarks in my post should be seen in the light of Boyle’s detailed explanations and telling examples. As a student I was explicitly told to read first this classic guide before going to Rome or Vatican City. His book should for once and all teach you the fact you need to know not only about the inventories or the editions, but also use every reliable guide you can find. Just reading Boyle’s remark that some Avignonese registers have been placed among the Registra Vaticana and vice versa should serve as a wake up call. For English readers his remarks about the contents of the various calendars created in England from papal registers are a must read. Instead of going blissfully unaware to digitized calendars at the British History portal reading Boyle’s explanations should alert you to many things concerning the study of papal registers.

Guidance to records of the medieval papacy

Far more voluminous than the surprisingly concise guide offered by Boyle is the guide created by Francis Blouin et alii (eds.), An Inventory and Guide to Historical Documents of the Holy See (Oxford 1998). First of all this fruit of the Michigan project (1984-2004) goes beyond the AAV also to other archives in Rome. There is an online version of Blouin’s guide at ArchiveGrid showing introductions to many hundred archival collections, including to the series with papal registers from the High Middle Ages. You can also benefit from the 2019 edition of the Indice dei Fondi e relativi mezzi di descrizione e di ricerca dell’Archivio segreto Vaticano is available online (PDF). The concise introduction to medieval papal records offered at the website of the Vatican Film Library should be mentioned here, too.

For studying records of the medieval papacy there is a wealth of scholarly literature. Some most useful basic introductions to the most important relevant works can be found in the section Analyzing Sources of the multilingual Swiss history portal Ad fontes (Universität Zurich). Searching for relevant scholarly literature is much helped by the online bibliography of the Regesta Imperii project in Mainz. The Regesta Imperii lists among its publications also the volumes of Papstregesten, systematic summaries of papal charters for the period 800 to 1198, an important help in studying this resource. An online resource in Munich, the Bibliographischer Datenbank Historische Grundwissenschaften, can be helpful, too, for finding literature. Both the database in Mainz and Munich can be searched with keywords (Schlagwort), the Munich database only in German. The portal LEO-BW (Landeskunde Entdecken Online-Baden Württemberg) has within its Südwestedeutsche Archivalienkunde [Archivistics for South-West Germany) in the section on charters (Urkunden) an illustrated introduction to papal charters, Papsturkunden by Anja Thaller. She points to online resources and mentions literature on several aspects.

Finding digitized papal records and manuscripts

In the compass of just one blog contribution it would in the end not help much to put in here literally everything. At my legal history website Rechtshistorie the page about canon law mentions a fair number of online projects concerning the medieval papacy. Over the years I have written here several posts on documents and manuscripts connected with the medieval papacy. In 2016 I published for example a post about the Palatini, the manuscripts originally from the library of the dukes of the Pfalz in Heidelberg brought to the Vatican Library in 1623 and now being digitized. Some manuscripts returned to Heidelberg, others remain in Vatican City.

Finding digitized manuscripts in the Vatican Library is easy thanks to the portal Digital Vatican Library. Perhaps it is more surprising to find also digitized archival records of the papacy at this portal. In my 2020 post about the 1352-1358 interdict on the city of Dordrecht I mentioned a number of digitized source editions, not only for the Avignonese papacy, but also for Dutch medieval history and the Vatican. My biographical research into a particularly interesting lawyer connected with the Dordrecht case led me to a latarium, a digitized register of verdicts and fines from the civil tribunal in Avignon (BAV, Vat. lat. 14774). Fourteen lataria ( BAV, Vat. lat. 14761 to 14774) have been digitized. Within the section for archives of this digital library you can find several small archival collections. There are also five notarial registers from Orange. I am quite aware that it might be possible to find more archival records among the digitized manuscripts of the BAV, and I hope to add them here or elsewhere.

It is harder to find digitized records online from the Archivio Apostolico Vaticano. Registers Introitus et Exitus of the Camera Apostolica between 1316 and 1324 (John XXII) 1334 and 1342 (Benedict XII) are the subject of digital editions as part of the project Ressources comptables en Dauphiné, Provence, Savoie et Venaissin (XIIIe-XVe siècle) with medieval accounts from four French regions and the papacy in Avignon and the region around this city, the Venaissin. Here, too, figures a papal register (Reg.Av. 46) among quite different resources, but it contains indeed accounts. In 2020 I thought this edition included also digitized images, but this is not the case.

Sometimes an approach from another direction can be helpful. We are used nowadays to viewing online digitized manuscripts and archival records in full color. The manuscripts digitized by the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana show a sometimes irritating watermark. Aaron Macks helps you every week to information about recently digitized manuscripts from the BAV. In former times scholars would often have no choice but to use black-and-white microfilms. The Vatican Film Library at Saint Louis University, St. Louis, MO, offers not only microfilms but also a useful overview by genre of manuscripts at the Vatican Library, an overview of papal registers, and the Metascripta portal for online research with Vatican manuscripts, mainly Vaticani Latini. On the page for medieval law of my website I mention more (digitized) microfilm collections.

A few years ago a team at the Università Roma Tre started the project In Codice Ratio for creating computerized character recognition in order to make possible automate transcription of handwritten text. In this project archival records from the AAV will be transcribed. As for now you can find the data set with the initial input and the ground truth, the set of images and transcriptions with a degree of error free results.

Many roads, many wishes

This post brings you perhaps less than you had expected, but it is longer than I assumed. Originally I planned a post dealing with text editions, digital libraries, inventories and digitized archival records. In the end I am happy I could recently write here about databases with medieval charters, among them papal charters, and in 2020 the papacy at Avignon figured large in a post. Thus the results here are at least less confusing and profuse. However, it was necessary to show indeed the variety of resources and some of the difficulties in using them for historical research, and in particular for legal history. If there had been a clear starting point for using online digitized records at the AAV I would surely have started here with them. The sheer mass of relevant text editions is overwhelming, although the Online Medieval Sources Bibliography is perhaps too generous in adding the label Papacy to many editions. Using multiple resources has as one implication thinking out of the box and working interdisciplinary without much ado. Legal history, too, should not be a confined discipline, a kind of silo as is the current phrase. Our discipline is well placed to question the use of digital resources when you or your students do not have the necessary skills and training to use them to their full extent. Combining such training and experience in using original sources should help you to tap the wealth of digitized medieval sources, and at the same time to be aware of what more can be found, what has been lost and which traces of such lost resources can enrich your research.

A postscript

Of course I was curious enough to find out quickly more about digitized registers among the manuscripts in the digital Vatican Library. For example, the manuscript BAV, Ross. 733 is a fifteenth-century register of taxes paid for the collation of diocesan sees. However, I should first of all add some registers from Avignon, starting with Vat. Lat 14775 with criminal inquests for the years 1365-1368 (copy in black and white), Vat. lat 14776 and Vat. lat. 14777 with verdicts in civil cases from 1364 and 1372, Vat.lat 14478, 14479 (fragments) and 14780, also from the fourteenth century. The descriptions of these registers clearly lack the word latarium for quick identification and grouping of Vat. Lat. 14761 to 14780.

Klaus Graf alerts at Archivalia to the fact a number of digitized edition of papal registers within the Hathi Trust Digital Library can be reached in open access only from the United States. Thus there is indeed space for another list of digital copies of these editions. Graf points also to some resources from Germany.

Connected histories: Ukraine, Russia and Eastern Europe

A general view of the Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) in Kiev, 2008 – image Wikimedia Commons

After the Second World War Europe had for decades no wars within its borders. The wars devastating the former Yugoslavia ended a period of peace, and after the war in Kosovo yet another peaceful period came which has now been broken. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has started an uncertain period. Assessing the facts about the war is difficult, because truth is the first victim of war. What can you find online about the history of Ukraine, Russia and Eastern Europe to study sources for the history and cultural heritage of peoples and nations involved and connected with them? In this post I will look at a number of archival guides, digital archives and libraries, and guides to cultural heritage. Some websites cannot be reached currently. Although I provide information about many archives and digital libraries on my legal history website it took me some time to bring things here together and to update my concise descriptions of resources. Even if this post does not bring consolation or help, it helps to focus attention to some matters that ere particular urgent.

Finding archives

In view of the vast dimensions of the digital world it is really silly to think you can find anything with one search engine, let alone with the algorithms of the Great Firm. Guides and web directories are not a thing we used only twenty years ago for good reasons, they still can be enormously helpful. Such guides are vulnerable for technical problems and difficult long term maintenance, especially when projects have to be integrated into normal core practice and functioning. Sometimes administrators and managers fail to see the unique value of what seems to them an obsolete legacy from the past century. The lifespan of digital projects can be relatively short. In some cases no notice is even given of the end or decommissioning of an online resource.

Let’s look at some European archive portals. Projects may depend on input from others or from the institutions involved. In the archival directory of the Archives Portal Europe you can find just one Ukrainian institution. Russia is not represented at all. The archival directory of the Cendari portal does not function currently. The International Council on Archives (ICA) has plans for an online directory, but in April 2020 the initiative The Archives and Records are Accessible was launched providing you with an interactive map of archives worldwide. This map shows some forty archives within Ukraine. It seems that almost every archive with a subdomain on the web domain of the Ukrainian government cannot be reached right now, except for the Central State Archive of Public Organizations in Ukraine (CDAGO) in Kyiv. Among its holdings is the archive of the communist party in Ukraine. There is an overview of the archival collections at the CDAGO.

ICA has created a directory of institutions all over the world with resources on literature and art. For Ukraine there is no entry in this directory. By the way, since 2018 ICA has a disaster relief fund.

In my view the most useful archival guide for Ukraine is offered online by the German Bundesstiftung zur Aufbearbeitung der SED-Diktatur (Goverment Foundation for the Critical Appraisal of the SED-Dictatorship) in its Vademecum-Reihe, a series of thirteen guides for the history of certain European countries and regions in the twentieth century. In 2008 appeared the Vademecum-Contemporary History Ukraine. A guide to archives, research institutions, libraries, associations and museums, edited by Georgiy Kasianov and Wilfried Jilge (PDF, 0,7 MB). The description of archives is fairly extensive. The information on museums is more concise, websites are often not mentioned. The section with websites is short but certainly important.

Using the Swiss meta-crawler eTools I could finally trace a digital version of Archives of Ukraine. Guide book issued by the State Archival Service of Ukraine (Kyiv 2012; PDF, 11,6 MB). It can be found at the website of the Ukrainian National Remembrance Institute which brings information online about many subjects in Ukraine’s history in the twentieth century. The guide to Russian and Ukrainian archives of University College London disappointingly offers only very concise information about archives in Russia.

For finding information about Russian archives you can benefit from several guides. With its sheer width the guide for Archives of Russia, Eastern Europe and Eurasia, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, easily stands out. You can use it in combination with the subject guides of the Slavic Reference Service of this university. Alas the guide created by the National Archives of Ukraine cannot be reached at this moment. It is a pity the link of the University of Illinois to its own extensive guide for Ukrainian archives does not function, but within the subject guides you can visit a similar interesting guide for Ukrainian archives. The general introduction to these archives and their history is worth your attention, too. By the way, the University of Illinois has put online The Russian Empire and Soviet Union: A Guide to Manuscripts and Archival Materials in the United States, Steven A. Grant and John H. Brown (eds.) (Boston, MA, 1980) as a database. This guide can be viewed in page view or PDF at the website of the Library of Congress, European Reading Room.

In the following guides the focus is on Russia itself and the former Soviet Union. The portal Access to Russian Archives is part of the TICFIA Project created by Eastview. Luckily you have free access to this guide for federal and regional archives with a search interface in English and Russian. The Russian State Archives offer Guides book search, a database for searching records in a number of Russian archives. It comes with an interface Russian and English, with transliteration option, a most useful thing. Let’s not forget another work in print: For archives in Moscow and St. Petersburg there is the massive guide by Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, Archives in Russia. A Directory and Bibliographic Guide to Holdings in Moscow and St.Petersburg (London, etc., 2016).

Eastview comes into view again with the ArcheoBiblioBase: Archives in Russia, long hosted by the International Institute for Social History, Amsterdam, but since 2020 it can be visited at its new URL. This database, too, points you to the Derzhavnii Komitet Arkhiviv Ukrainy, unfortunately not reachable now. I will not praise here the IISH again, but this online service is indeed most valuable.

The old AAB logo used for Grimsted’s concise online guide to Ukrainian archives

Patricia Kennedy Grimsted has created a summarized version of the information for Ukrainian archives taken from ArcheoBiblioBase. For this database her monograph Archives and Manuscript Repositories in the USSR, vol. 3: Ukraine and Moldavia, I: General Bibliography and Institutional Directory (Princeton, NJ, 1988) has paramount importance. She is also the author of Trophies of war and empire: the archival heritage of Ukraine, World War II, and the international politics of restitution (Cambridge, MA, 2001).

By now it should be clear that gaining correct and updated information about Ukrainian archives is not as easy as you would expect in our world with the fruits of thirty years online information supposedly at your finger tips! These days I could reach only a few archival websites in Ukraine. I should mention in particular the Centre for Research on the Liberation Movement, Lviv, a centre for the study of Ukraine’s history since the nineteenth century, with its own Digital Archive of the Ukrainian Liberation Movement containing digitized documents from several periods since the nineteenth century, searchable with an interface in Ukrainian and English. We saw already the Ukrainian National Remembrance Institute with several important projects.

In order not to focus only on current developments I remembered the EHRI portal (European Holocaust Research Infrastructure). At this portal you can find an introduction to Ukrainian archives with a view for resources concerning this subject. Two years ago I looked at the EHRI project in a post about the history of looted and lost art during the Second World War. On February 25, 2022 the International Council on Archives published a statement of solidarity with Ukrainian archives and archivists.

Digital libraries in Ukraine

It took me relatively much time to create the section on archives in this post, even though I had at least some archival guides at hand on my legal history website. It could do no harm to check these guides again and to look elsewhere for more information. However, in 2020 and 2021 I had already searched for digital libraries in Ukraine. Their number is relatively low. It appeared that a number of digital institutional repositories have subcollections with historic material. For a quick look I would like to refer you to my web page for digital libraries. Among recent additions is the virtual museum (interface Ukrainian and English) of the Digital Library, National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Kiev.

Instead of looking here at particular digital libraries I had better mention here the portal of the Institute for the History of Ukraine. You can use a multilingual interface among other things to navigate a database for internet resources, but unfortunately it seems at the time of writing only the first results of each section become visible. The database contains sources from many countries and does not restrict itself to Ukraine.

When starting this post I soon found the website of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI). Its list of teaching resources is a fair attempt at a comprehensive guide to online resources for Ukrainian culture and history. There is a section on digital archival collections, almost all of them the fruit of research centres, and not digitized archival records held by more regular archives in Ukraine. Apart from its own library and archive the great jewel of the HURI is the MAPA Digital Atlas of Ukraine with both historical and contemporary maps.

Cultural heritage in Ukraine

Originally I had liked to put here a similar and extensive section focusing on digital access to Ukraine’s cultural heritage, but it is perhaps more sensible to publish this post as quickly as possible. I will at least point here to another service of the University of Illinois, an overview of the main bibliographies for Ukraine, part of its guide for Ukraine. The V.I. Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine provides you with an array of online bibliographical resources. The dictionary platform Lexilogos has created for Ukraine a list of online dictionaries, language resources, and some general websites. As for other languages the first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is given. The University of Iowa has a useful choice of language and culture resources, too.

The World Heritage Convention of UNESCO lists eight locations in Ukraine on its World Heritage List. For museums you could for example look at the Museum Portal. The 2008 Vademecum for Ukraine discussed earlier mentions a number of history museums. On February 24, 2022 the International Council on Museums (ICOM) issued a statement concerning the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The ICOM has a telling motto, “Museums have no borders, they have a network”. Feeling connected and staying in touch with Ukraine is certainly crucial now and in the future. Hopefully this post can support you in your own efforts to foster a connected future.

Some early additions

On February 27, 2022 I could reach the websites of the Central State Archive of Supreme Bodies of Power and Government (TsDAVO) in Kyiv, the State Archives of Lviv, the State Archive of the Kirovohrad Region. and the State Archive of the Kharkiv Region.

The website GeoHistory has a detailed guide on Russian archives. This website publishes regularly articles about Ukraine. ICA has created a bibliography about displaced archives and shared archival heritage. The German Slavistik portal with its links and databases can help you a lot (interface German and English). The library of the Davis Center at Harvard University provides guidance to materials concerning Eastern Europe at Harvard and elsewhere. At the website of the Ukrainian parliament you can find the official list of immovable cultural heritage in Ukraine (September 3, 2009).

Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO) is an initiative to create web archives of disappeared or threatened websites and digital projects in Ukraine. ReHERIT is a portal for Ukrainian cultural heritage (interface Ukrainian and English). Another website worth mentioning is the Center for Urban History in Lviv (interface Ukrainian and English) with several online projects.

It occurred to me I had not looked at all at OCLC’s ArchiveGrid portal for information about Ukrainian archives. As a matter of fact, no archive in Ukraine is currently present at this portal. I suppose I avoided ArchiveGrid because its mixture of information about archival institutions, archival collections in their holdings and even single objects is in my view awkward. However, searching for Ukraine does bring you to a number of institutions elsewhere in the world with relevant holdings that deserve mentioning.

The Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of Kent, Canterbury, has created an overview of websites and projects for Ukrainian history with a focus on manuscripts.

For Ukrainian contemporary law and government it is most sensible to look first of all at the guide provided by the Law Library of Congress, with guidance to other relevant guides as well.

A legal window on late medieval material culture

Archaeologists and historians in general do things differently. Archaeologists search and interpret material objects and traces of human history hidden from sight in the soil, and historians look at still existing documentary evidence, be they written documents or artefacts above ground level. Thus the title of the digital project The Documentary Archaeology of Late Medieval Europe (DALME) created at Harvard University is at least intriguing. The core and clue of this projects are written documents telling us about objects sometimes no longer existing which offer a glimpse of medieval households.

Without twisting the evidence of these inventories you can view a number of them as the results of actions required by law or statutes. In this post I want to highlight these legal dimensions and look at the qualities of the DALME project which has been awarded the 2022 Digital Humanities and Multimedia Studies Prize of the Medieval Academy of America.

Precious traces of material surroundings

Many scholars are involved with this project, both at Harvard and elsewhere. The project is led by Daniel Lord Smail, Gabriel Pizzorno and Laura Morreale. The principal objective of the DALME project is to bring together both inventories in the holdings of archives and objects nowadays kept by museums. The project aims also at developing a common vocabulary and a digital infrastructure facilitating research from various disciplines. The inventories and objects can be approached in several ways and will be accompanied by essays. Until now only three essays have been published at the project website. The latest essay by Marcus Tomaszewski published in January 2022 looks at a German tradition of poems with inventories. Laura Morreale looked in her 2020 essay on enslaved persons in fourteenth-century Florence. In the general overview much stress is put on the difficulties of reading and deciphering medieval scripts and languages, but this is not an unique feature for studying medieval history. Classicists dealing with for example the Near East face similar obstacles.

The introduction to the methodology of the DALME project stresses a kind of material turn that has influenced scholars in many disciplines in the past decades. Inventories are much valued as a window on daily life. Objects are every bit as important to tell us the history of humanity as written sources. It seems logical to bring them together to enhance making relevant comparisons of material life and circumstances.

It is important, too, to have a look also at the DALME workflow for inventories. Before images of documents gain their final form in the system behind DALME a lot of steps are to be set. These images are used to create transcriptions and to provide annotation. The information thus created is subsequently parsed and re-encoded. For creating a uniform and searchable terminology the Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) of The Getty is used.

One should not overlook the section with project publications nor the bibliography pointing to source editions, scholarly literature, glossaries and dictionaries and other relevant publications, often with links to digital versions. Links becomes only visible when your cursor arrives at them. Obviously the study of Daniel Lord Smail, Legal plunder. Households and debt collection in late medieval Europe (Cambridge, MA, 2016) has stimulated the creation of the DALME project; incidentally, you can view the bibliography for this book online. There is no section with general online resources, and thus the name of Joseph Byrne and his online bibliography of medieval and Early Modern wills and probate inventories is missing. Byrne points for example to a number of articles by Martin Bertram published in the journal Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken (QFIAB) and in other journals on testaments from Bologna. Issues from 1958 onwards of QFIAB can be seen online at the Perspectivia portal. Among general resources for tracing relevant literature and editions the online bibliography for medieval studies of the Regesta Imperii in Mainz, and the Online Medieval Sources Bibliography should take their rightful place. The latter has even a preset filter for material culture. A recent article by R.C. Allen and R.W. Unger about their Global Commodities Prices Database is mentioned, but there is no link to their database. It is good to see the work of Daniel Williman and Karen Corsano, The spoils of the Pope and the pirates, 1357: the complete legal dossier from the Vatican Archives (2nd edition, 2014) has been included.

Eight collections of inventories

I had honestly thought my remarks about the bibliography of the DALME project would form my last grumbles in this post, but when you choose in the Features menu for objects you will find just a few objects discussed in sometimes very short essays. Maybe this section will be enlarged soon, but now it is still nearly empty.

The Collections section brings you to eight collections. You can search or browse them. Both options come with very practical filters. In the browsing mode you can use a filter for record type showing you graphically all kinds of legal documents and the various genres of inventories. When you choose to explore the collections you can navigate an interactive map of Europe. DALME brings you at this moment nearly 500 records.

Two collections show immediately in the title their legal nature, 58 records for Florentine wards (1381-1393) and insolvent households in Bologna (1285-1299) with 41 records. The section with ecclesiastical inventories focuses currently on French priests and canons. It will contain in the near future inventories from some well-known cathedrals and monasteries. DALME shows its strength in particular in presenting 50 Jewish inventories from France, Germany and Spain, a rare resource. Tax seizures, inquests into crimes and notarial acts or services formed the legal ground to create these records. Apart from a collection focusing on records from cities in Northern Lombardy, from Marseille and the region around this town, with 168 records the largest collection, there is a collection for the States of Savoy (24 records) and a miscellaneous collection, good for 121 records. Each collection comes with a general introduction, a section on its goals and objectives, explanations about the sample, some highlights and information about the intellectual owner of and contributors to a particular DALME collection.

In a second section with four categories you can approach partial and fragmentary lists created for seizures, estimates, sales and tariffs. Currently only a small number of sales and estimates can be viewed.

For my own pleasure I searched in Dutch online resources for an inventory made in 1297 of goods found at the convent of the Hospitaller Knights of St. John in Utrecht and transferred to a canon of the Oudmunster collegiate chapter and Jan van Duvenvoorde. The inventory in this charter has been identified as a list of goods belonging to count Floris V of Holland who had stayed there in Utrecht just before he was killed near Muiderberg on June 27, 1296. You can find editions of the charter in the Oorkondenboek van het Sticht Utrecht tot 1301 (1297 April 6, OSU V, no. 2812) and the Oorkondenboek van Holland en Zeeland tot 1299 (OHZ V, no. 3268). The presence of chivalric cloths, many gloves and silver objects is indeed telling. Alas the original of this charter no longer exists, but seventeenth-century copies of it have survived.

Some early impressions

An example of the record view in DALME, here with a Florentine inventory from 1381 – Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Magistrato dei pupilli avanti il principato 4, f. 71r

When searching inventories at DALME a few things become clear. You can currently only find items in their original languages or when they are mentioned in the record description, and not yet using the promised thesaurus function. In my view a major feature is thus currently not yet present. There is a difference between records taken directly from archival sources and those taken over from existing editions. In some cases a part of a document has not been transcribed because it does not contain a part of the proper household inventory. For the document shown here above with 31 folia this restriction is most sensible.

To be honest, I feel a bit baffled by the laurels given to this project in this stage. In my view the report about the 2022 DHMS Award shows a cavalier attitude to some of the clear deficiencies and missing qualities of DALME in its current state. Of course I can see that bringing together documents in twelve languages, providing images and transcriptions and commentaries is surely a feat. Creating 500 records in one year is not a particularly large number. DALME does aim at open access and easy interoperability, but the report states it is still unclear whether third-party software can harvest directly from DALME. The use of TEI for encoding the records and Zotero for the bibliography is commendable, but why create your own remix of tools for the management systems behind the screens? At GitHub you can find the necessary technical information about the databases of DALME and the mix of tools applied for it, but no direct link is given to the bibliography at Zotero. For all its qualities Zotero is notably weak when it comes to actually finding a group library within it. The twelve languages do not return in the choice of glossaries and dictionaries in the DALME bibliography.

DALME’s relatively low number of records for inventories, the very low number of objects and the lack of integration between them, are quite visible. Add to this the uncertainty about reuse and the absence of a fundamental essay on the legal nature of many documents, and you have grounds for reasonable doubts about the core qualities of this digital project. For some collections you find more or less detailed information about the kind of legal documents, but as for now there are no general essays introducing the various source genres. Contributions by legal historians would here be most welcome.

Let’s for a moment turn away from DALME and look more generally at criteria and standards for evaluating digital projects. A few years ago the Medieval Academy of America developed a serious basic set of standards for its database Medieval Digital Resources (MDR), discussed here in 2019. For viewing images the use of a standard such as IIIF is recommended, but this has not been used at DALME. However, its images are at least zoomable. Luckily, DALME seems otherwise compliant with the MAA’s standards advocated at its database and guide for medieval digital resources. By the way, I could not help using MDR to search quickly for other projects concerning material culture. Using the preset filter for this subject I could only view the first page of the results; going to the next page ended at an empty search form. MDR does contain numerous online dictionaries and bibliographies. A number of them has been included in the DALME bibliography.

A medieval key, c. 1375-1500, an example of a early comb-bit key, length 52 mm – private collection, PAN no. 00013245 – image Portable Antiquities Netherlands

The DALME project comes with high aims based on sound research. I truly expected 3D images of objects or at least integration with one museum catalogue for medieval objects or a portal for archaeological objects, such as Portable Antiquities Netherlands. A year after its launch some wishes to make DALME outstanding could perhaps have been already fulfilled. I could not help noticing that for example the collections from Florence and Bologna are a century apart of each other, and thus comparisons are not as straightforward as possible, even though such comparisons remain challenging. As for the Florentine documents, a choice from the early fifteenth century would have invited a comparison with data in the Online Catasto for 1427-1429, created by the late David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, and hosted at Brown University. It is reassuring to find a helpful table with some suggested equivalent terms in various languages and a clear list of online dictionaries in the classroom section. In an upcoming seminar Laura Morreale (Georgetown University) will focus on editing and transcribing Florentine documents.

How does this project compare to similar projects elsewhere? I looked briefly at the BoschDoc portal for documents concerning the Dutch painter Jheronimus Bosch. Its search possibilities are impressive. Some eighty inventories have been included, many of them with images, transcriptions, translations and references to relevant literature. The background information, in particular for technical matters, is much more restricted than for DALME, but it does contain a useful list of transcription criteria. The difficulty of scripts and languages is bewailed at DALME, but the actual approach to overcome them is not made completely explicit nor are solutions actually implemented or visible. Hopefully Laura Morreale and her colleagues can quickly add their set of transcription criteria to DALME.

The fact I devoted a rather lengthy review to DALME indicates indeed my opinion that in the end we can welcome a valuable resource for medieval historians at large. Its flaws have to be redeemed, but they help in a way to view similar projects much clearer. I must add that navigating the menus for background information was not as easy as using the collections themselves. The larger essays at DALME are certainly worth your attention and wet the appetite for more. I would be hard pressed to determine whether DALME is a pilot project or a project in its beta phase. In my view DALME is not yet a convincing winner of the DHMS award. Despite all drawbacks Smail, Pizzorno and Morreale deserve praise for their initiative, as do the other scholars who worked hard to provide images, transcriptions and additional information. This international project brings us for now a kind of showcase of what can become a resource not just to use for your own goals, but to discuss with historians from other disciplines as an exercise in rethinking your approaches to medieval documents and objects. The lacks and omissions at DALME should help you to raise your own standards, to apply standards for data exchange with other resources, and to reflect on the use of evaluation standards for digital projects.

Some afterthoughts

After publishing this post I quickly realized some additions might be helpful. A fine example of an image database for medieval and Early Modern material culture is REALonline of the Institut für Realienkunde des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit (IMAREAL) in Krems an der Donau. In its journal Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture Online (MEMO) the issue no. 7 (December 2020) was devoted to the theme “Textual Thingness”. In this issue the article by Christina Antenhofer, ‘Inventories as Material and Textual Sources for Late Medieval and Early Modern Social, Gender and Cultural History (14th-16th centuries)’, MEMO 7 (2020) 22-46, provides you among other things with a brief discussion of the various forms and (legal) origins of inventories. She mentions the entry for inventories in a German dictionary for legal history by Ruth Mohrmann, ‘Inventar’, in: Handwörterbuch zur deutschen Rechtsgeschichte II (2nd ed. Berlin 2012), cc. 1284–1285.

At a few moments since writing this post I checked the database Medieval Digital Resources (MDR) and its browse and search functions to find projects about material culture. The snag with both functions of not being able to proceed from a first page with results remains, but at last I saw in September 2023 you can avoid irritation about this still unsolved bug in certain cases, and luckily this is the case for tags used for resources such as material culture. The successive results pages for individual are shown correctly. However, this particular tag only seldom bears directly at MDR to resources connected truly with existing medieval artefacts. MDR does indeed distinguish carefully between material culture as a subject heading, and material evidence as a general source genre. The true bug lies more in the inconsistent use of tags without a clear classification scheme with sufficient levels, a taxonomy or thesaurus.

Reframing a medieval bureaucracy: Databases for papal charters

At my blog medieval canon law is a special subject. Lately I have written here a few times about medieval charters. In 2020 I devoted a very long post to a number of papal charters from the fourteenth century issued around an interdict on the Dutch city of Dordrecht. This year the quadrennial congress on medieval canon law will hopefully take place in St. Louis from July 17 to 23.. Another scholarly event scheduled for this month came into view as a subject worth attention here. On February 17-18, 2022 a conference will be held on the theme “Papsturkunden ohne Ende”: Datenbanken ohne Ende? / “Actes à l’infini”: des bases de données infinies?, the endless stream of papal charters in view of the endless powers of modern relational databases. Scholars will deal with a number of projects for such databases. In this post I propose to look at some of them a bit longer, either because of their importance or because they are new of relatively new.

By chance I saw a notice about a project for a portal enabling you to search in numerous databases with medieval charters, Cartae Europae Medii Aevi (CEMA). It figures in a paper in Luxembourg, too, and it seems natural to present this resource and its many facilities here, too, to add depth to the description of databases for papal charters.

Three related perspectives

The scholarly meeting in Luxembourg comes with a triple subtitle: Databases, interoperability and shared solutions. It is indeed one thing to put information into a database, another thing to exchange information and metadata, and thirdly there is the matter of not inventing the wheel again but borrowing consciously from best practices elsewhere, and preferably working together on solutions. French and German scholars find each other here first of all in a project around the medieval kingdom Lotharingia which gave its name to the Lorraine region now in France. Recently Harald Müller, Hannes Engl, Michel Margue and Timoth Salemme presented their project INTERLOR in the article ‘Vorstellung des Forschungsprojekts «INTERLOR – Lotharingien und das Papsttum. Interaktions-,Integrations- und Transformationsprozesse im Spannungsfeld zwischen zentraler Steuerung und regionaler Eigendynamik (11. – Anfang 13. Jahrhundert)»’, Studi di Storia Medioevale e di Diplomatica n.s. 5 (2021). This project with scholars from Aachen and Luxembourg will focus on the cathedral cities of Liège and Metz, on the presence of Premonstratensian and Cistercian monks, secular power and the perception of the papacy.

On February 17, 2022, papers will be presented about a number of existing databases and the new database for INTERLOR. Thorsten Schlauwitz (Erlangen-Neurenberg) will speak about the database version of the Regesta pontificum romanorum. The Aposcripta database for papal letters is the subject in a paper by Julien Thery (Lyon). Rolf Große and Sebastian Gensicke (Paris) will discuss the project Gallia Pontificia and more specifically regests for acts of the archbishops of Reims. Muriel Foulonneau and Timothy Salemme (Luxembourg) present the new INTERLOR database, and a round-table discussion will be the conclusion of the first day.

The second session on February 18 will look at the roads from textual corpora to textual databases and the chances for data mining of medieval charters. Here Dominik Trump (Cologne) will look at the hybrid edition of the so-called Kapitularien, decrees of the Carolingian rulers, now available online in the project Capitularia – Edition der fränkischen Herrschererlasse. Problems of indexation of medieval charters will be addressed by Sergio Torres (Paris). Nicolas Perreaux (Paris) will discuss data mining, stylometrics and semantics in connection with the project and database Cartae Europae Medii Aevi (CEMA). Thus this database is indeed for a good reason also a theme in my post.

How will historians use such resources? This question is leading in the paper by Sébastien de Valériola (Brussels) who will look at data mining and data-driven research. Finally Bastien Dubuisson (Luxembourg and Namur) will speak about the transition from database to code for implementing stylometric research for medieval history. This is perhaps the best place to mention the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (“C²DH”).

A look at two databases

It will not do to present here all databases in the compass of a single post. I give at least the URL’s of existing databases. I could not yet find the URL for the INTERLOR database. Finding such databases is helped by a page of the CEMA website with a list of projects in many European countries.

Some databases attract your attention because they aim at providing access to documents from a long period and from a wide range of places. The Aposcripta database is hosted at the Telma portal for databases with medieval charters of the IRHT in Paris (Twitter @aposcripta). The project takes its name from the expression apostolica scripta, a term used by popes for their letters. This database was launched in 2017. It contains currently some 22,000 items, some 14,000 of them from the thirteenth century and nearly 2,800 letters from the twelfth century. These numbers are rather low. You could already find in the first printed edition of the Regesta pontificum romanorum more than ten thousand summaries of papal charters up to 1198. However, Aposcripta scores points with its impressive overview of editions used and mentioned. Entering ten thousand items and more issued per annum after 1300 will be quite a feat. Aposcripta rightly warns you not to expect everything mentioned in an edition also in its database, stressing the fact it is more a search tool than a digital archive.

With Aposcripta you get an idea of the sheer mass still awaiting digital treatment. The question of interoperability comes inevitably into view for the Cartae Europae Medii Aevi (CEMA) hosted also in Paris (Twitter @Carta_Europae). Even a restriction to currently twenty digital resources for this portal is understandable. The tabs of the search screen of CEMA open new vistas. I have seen various online textual corpora and their search facilities, and I have repeatedly mentioned here the wonders of Philologic4, in particular for the Corpus synodalium, a database and repertory at Stanford for medieval synods and statutes discussed here in 2020. CEMA offers multiple ways of searching in 270,000 charters. Even if I did not immediately spot a chronological filter this is probably just an oversight on my side, and more to the point a sign of my bias as a historian keen on temporal precision! Speaking of another way of representation, the Regesta pontificum Romanorum has a geo browser.

CEMA has undoubtedly most interesting qualities bringing research concerning medieval charters on a new level of depth and possible comparisons. It scores also with a bibliographical database for source editions which builds for instance on the earlier CartulR database of the IRHT for editions of French cartularies. Some 2,700 editions have already been included in the new database.

Into the future

In view of all things now at your disposition in these databases it feels a bit too strict to mention here some gaps or seemingly missing projects. You would expect the inclusion of more existing projects for CEMA. It does raise the question of standards for data exchange and interoperability. Just one of the Scandinavian Diplomataria is currently harvested for CEMA. The fine project for medieval charters from the territories of current Belgium in Diplomata Belgica would seem most fit as a further extension. Can some of the digitized Dutch editions of charters in oorkondenboeken available at the resources platform of the Huygens Institute, Amsterdam, also be among future additions? The database with medieval and Early Modern charters held in Dutch archives, the Digitale Charterbank Nederland, discussed here in 2019, is probably too much a resource for archivists than a tool for the field of diplomatics.

Writing this post and mentioning the Corpus synodalium created by Rowan Dorin and his team in Stanford I remember his warnings at the online digital legal history conference in March 2021 about creating and maintaining databases for the future, the seduction of putting in all available materials, and the need for the use of widely recognized standards with a view to things as a conversion to another database or extraction into some other system. It is not just a matter of bringing the water from a number of lakes into a new sea, and leaving the result unattended afterwards.

In my opinion the meeting in Luxembourg helps you to welcome the differences between databases with their various earlier history in print as road signs to paths you might explore. It would be most tempting to create an all-encompassing database for medieval charters with images, transcriptions and scholarly commentaries. For textual research you will want access to a kind of corpus, and this wish is every bit as valuable. Bridging distances between scholars from nations with a history of both wars and fruitful mutual influence is one thing, bridging gaps between scholarly approaches in neighboring disciplines is certainly a serious goal, too. I am sure the scholars participating in this conference and working on the projects I concisely mentioned in my post are quite willing to share their experience building on the sometimes very old research traditions behind them. Their openness to new tools and questions are a sign of the vitality of these projects and the teams currently responsible for bringing them into our century.

Grotius through students’ eyes

During summer some lighter subjects can come into view, but sometimes you suddenly notice something well worth looking at. In order to protect you from too much centenary celebrations I try to choose every year just a few of them. A new virtual exhibit concerning Hugo Grotius starts with a winning title, Grotius: A life between freedom and oppression has been launched in March 2021 by Leiden University Library on a new platform for its web presentations. One of the most celebrated historic events in the canon of Dutch history is the escape of Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) from castle Loevestein in 1621 where he was imprisoned as the chief follower of the late Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, the statesman who had done so much in creating the blossoming Dutch Republic. An exhibition in Amersfoort on Van Oldenbarnevelt and prince Maurits (Maurice) came into view here a few years ago, and just like in that summer post a particular historical object will figure here. The matters under discussion here are in the end not just light-weight, and thus I finished this post only in autumn.

A canonical figure in Dutch legal history

Before you sigh at the prospect of going on well-trodden paths with me you should know nine students of Leiden University College in The Hague prepared the virtual exhibit in English. Together with their supervisors Hanne Cuyckens and Jacqueline Hylkema they did choose five focal points which are just different enough to make you curious again about Grotius. In the first section, Leiden, the student, he forming years of the child prodigy form the subject. Grotius matriculated at Leiden in 1594 at the age of ten years. For each subject a number of objects are shown, in this case for example the matriculation register, a portrait of Grotius at fifteen, the earliest printed map of Leiden and a portrait of the famous philologist Joseph Justus Scaliger, the best known teacher of Grotius. Grotius started at Leiden with literary studies, not with jurisprudence, freedom indeed for this child prodigy to develop himself in many directions. In 1598 he obtained his doctoral degree in law at Orléans.

In the second section we do not jump at once to his major publications such as Mare Liberum (1609), followed by De iure belli ac pacis (1625) and the Inleidinghe tot de Hollandsche rechtsgeleerdheid (1631). Even a young superstar as Grotius had to immerse himself in at least one subject not just in learned books and contemporary theory, but also in daily practice. Grotius was admitted in 1599 as an advocate to the Hof van Holland, the high court of Holland in The Hague. His position as a lawyer made him for Van Oldenbarnevelt the obvious candidate to set out at length the Dutch position on the freedom of the seas. Already in 1598 Grotius accompanied him on a embassy to France, and afterwards the two men stayed in contact with each other. In this section there is also attention for Grotius’ religious views articulated in his work Ordinum pietas (1613). It put him firmly on the side of the Remonstrant movement favored also by Oldenbarnevelt.

Castle Loevestein – image Wikimedia Commons

The third section brings you to Grotius’ imprisonment at Loevestein Castle on ground of his religious and political views. The castle is placed on a marvelous strategic spot in the Rhine delta where several of its branches come together. The nearby towns of Gorinchem and Woudrichem are not easily reached. The background with the execution of Oldenbarnevelt in 1619 gets due attention, as are his religious views. You can also look at two letters. When you try to navigate to subsequent items this does not always function correctly. I had expected a link to the online version of the edition of Grotius’ correspondence at the portal of the Huygens Institute in Amsterdam nor to the version at its philological platform Textual Scholarship or to the catalogue at Early Modern Letters Online, but you can look at scans of original letters held at Leiden. The project Circulation of Knowledge and Learned Practices in the 17th-Century Dutch Republic could be added as well.

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  The chest of the Rijksmuseum

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  The chest at Loevestein, photo Tom Haartsen

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  The chest at Delft, photo Ivo Hoekstra

At Loevestein Grotius was allowed to borrow books from Leiden university library. These books were transported in a large and heavy chest. Hidden in the book chest Grotius could famously escape on March 22, 1621 from castle Loevestein. In 2020 a part of the television series created by the Rijksmuseum on Historisch bewijs (Historical evidence) was devoted to establishing which book chest of three chests held at the Rijksmuseum, Loevestein and Museum Prinsenhof in Delft was probably the original book chest. The chest in Delft has suitable dimensions and a more reliable provenance from the Graswinckel family who was closely connected to the De Groot family in Delft, but no evidence was adduced to confirm its actual use beyond any doubt. Thus the chest is a kind of objet de mémoire connected with an almost mythical heroic story, and the natural point of focus at castle Loevestein, a typical nationalist lieu de mémoire on a beautiful spot at the point where the Waal branch of the Rhine and a branch of the Meuse come together.

In the fourth section of the online exhibit we arrive with Grotius as an exile in Paris. In this town he completed his treatise De iure belli ac pacis. Apart from letters and a map of Paris poetry by Grotius and a poem by Joost van den Vondel come into view here.

The autograph manuscript of “De iure praedae” – Leiden University Library, ms. BPL 917 – image Leiden University Library

The fifth and final section of the virtual exhibit deals with the major treatise by Grotius on prize law, De iure praedae. The Leiden manuscript BPL 917 is the sole handwritten and even autograph witness to the text of Grotius’ treatise on prize law and booty composed between 1604 and 1609. Only one chapter was published during his life as Mare Liberum (1609). The restoration of this manuscript and the subsequent digitization for the full digital edition published in 2015 are the very heart of this section.

By choosing four actual locations – Leiden, The Hague, Loevestein and Paris – the nine students succeed easily in freeing Grotius from a too narrow view of him as only a figure in Dutch history who became first a victim of religious strife and later on a figure head in the struggle for tolerance. These backgrounds do matter indeed. No doubt some Dutch people will be surprised to find the article on Grotius in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and its rich bibliography. He is regarded as the very founder of natural law. Thus there is an entry for Grotius, too, in the database Natural Law 1625-1850, one of the fruits of a research project of the universities at Halle, Erfurt and Bayreuth. By showing not just works by Grotius, and not only his legal works, but also his poems and a treatise on religion, the students show him as a major intellectual in European history. You might with me deplore the lack of further links or an essential bibliography, but there is surely a place for the approach chosen for this virtual exhibit.

Recently Leiden University launched a new platform for its online exhibits. Among the digital collections of Leiden University Library is a section with nearly fifty virtual exhibitions; in some cases only a PDF remains available.

As for creating a Grotius Year the museum Loevestein can readily be pardoned for seeking a way to attract visitors after the corona lockdowns in the Netherlands. The website for the public events around the Grotius commemoration does mention his importance as a lawyer, diplomat and theologian. Themes as the freedom of thought and religious tolerance are vitally relevant in our contemporary world. Showing things have been very different in the past shakes (young) people free from thinking the present has always been there as a a most natural thing.

In earlier posts about Grotius, in particular the one about a rare early edition of De iure beli ac pacis, I provided information about his main legal works concerning the first printed editions, modern editions, translations and digital versions. I would like to point again to the presence of text versions and seventeenth-century or modern translations into Dutch for a number of his works at the portal of the Digitale Bibliotheek voor de Nederlandse Letteren (DBNL). In the DBNL you can find also digital versions of numerous older publications about Grotius, and the entry for his historical works by E.O.G. Haitsma Mulier and G. van der Lem in their work on Early Modern Dutch historiography, Repertorium van geschiedschrijvers in Nederland 1500-1800 (The Hague 1990).

The riches of the Peace Palace Library

The Peace Palace Library (PPL) in The Hague is the natural starting point for any research on Hugo Grotius. Lately this library has put its digital collections on a new separate platform, but for some silly reason the actual URL is not easily found at the website of the PPL, as are alas some other web addresses. A few years ago I wrote here about the Scheldt River collection which now can be found, too, at this new platform. It seems the PPL provides for each collection on this platform a special page with the correct link. However, there is no page or news item for the new platform itself, or maybe it has only to be added to the top bar menu. A platform with eight interesting collections in open access merits a place in the spotlights.

The PPL contributes two collections in open access to LLMC Digital, but no direct links are give on the PPL’s special page for its collections at LLMC Digital. It is only fair to say that finding these collections at the LLMC portal is a feat in itself. So far my attempts to locate them simply failed. Both LLMC Digital and the website of the PPL lack a general search function and a sitemap. The collections at both websites deserve better accessibility. As for the licensed digital collections and also for the databases accessible through the PPL you might contemplate acquiring a library card of this library. For this choice, too, hving a clear overview of digitized materials and their access is most practical.

Grotius figures of course also on the website of the PPL, starting with the chat function called Ask Hugo! The web page on the Grotius Collection tells you about the general background and the famous bibliography by Ter Meulen and Diermanse [J. ter Meulen and P.P.J. Diermanse (eds.), Bibliographie des écrits imprimés de Hugo Grotius (The Hague 1950)] and a more recent catalogue of the PPL’s holdings of works by Grotius. Instead of the direct link to the licensed Grotius Collection Online: Printed Works of Brill only a link to the title in the PPL library catalogue is provided, yet another minor howler. In fact this digital collection contains also numerous works dealing with Old Dutch law, and I would even single it out as a very representative selection of legal books from the Dutch Republic brought most conveniently together. A research guide for Grotius would be a welcome addition to the thirty existing online guides on the website of the Peace Palace Library. A quick search for a nutshell guide to Grotius brought me only to a very concise guide created by the Alexander Campbell King Law Library at the University of Georgia. It is sensible to look at the Grotius pages of Wikipedia in several languages.

Gaining a wider view

I would like to end this post constructively, and not with criticism on defects. Grotius belongs to the group of thinkers students and scholars cannot approach completely straightforward. Often there is abundant scholarly activity, there might be opposing schools and roads of interpretation and across linguistic borders studies can take refreshing turns closed to those staying content with Anglo-American scholarship. Luckily regularly guides are published in the form of essay volumes by an international team of distinguished scholars to bridge such gaps and bring together different views and themes surrounding a major thinker. In September 2021 the Cambridge Companion to Hugo Grotius appeared in print and online, edited by Randall Lesaffer and Janne Nijman. Interestingly this seems to be the first companion volume to Grotius. There is not yet A Very Short Introduction on Grotius from Oxford, presumably exactly because his versatility can hardly be sufficiently shown in a slim volume by a single author. Hopefully different views on Grotius find space in the scholarly journal Grotiana with apart for the printed version some articles published online in open access.

This year’s International Open Access Week will take place from October 25 to 31, 2021. The existence of a number of vital online resources for doing research on Grotius only accessible as licensed resources, most often through the services of libraries, diminishes the chances for those outside the circle of blessed beneficiaries to learn more about Grotius or about other major intellectuals whose thought changed the world forever. Institutions not caring or simply forgetting to provide even links to their own digital collections, be they in open or licensed access, should reflect on their duties and capacities to help both scholars and the general public. Of course in some cases it is a matter of discommunication or worse between for example a library staff, a project leader and the communication officers.

It might seem seducing to bring your collections under the flag of a prestigious publishing company, but if this means closing access to your priceless possessions for most of the world the ultimate blame should be in my view on their original holder. In my view individual scholars, scholarly communities, publishers and research institutions, including university presses, all have their own ongoing responsibility to discuss matters concerning access to scholarly publications. In actual life both institutions with digitized resources and publishers increasingly offer digitized materials both in licensed and in open access, depending on their policies. Hopefully solutions can be found to create and assure wider access whenever possible and feasible for us and future generations interested in the versatile mind of Grotius and the impact of his works through the centuries. Sailing oceans with free, affordable and sustainable access to research resources would be most helpful to achieve this aim.

Bringing together European historical bibliographies

Making lists and overviews is one of my typical habits. I am always glad to find online overviews of projects and websites or portals to an entire range of projects. Thus every now and then I used the portal European Historical Bibliographies (HistBib), hosted by the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (BBAW). Only last week I saw this portal had been archived on January 14, 2021. It is clear I do not regularly use this portal, but having quick access to these historical bibliographies can be most useful. In this post I will report on my efforts to find a similar commented overview of these important online resources, because using the right bibliography can make a huge difference for your research. Almost all reources I mention are accessible in open access. Among other reasons to create a new list is the fact yet again a relevant database, the Digitale Bibliografie Nederlandse Geschiedenis, will disappear in its current form in July 2021.

More than a dozen

When using HistBib my impression was always that it covered more or less some twenty countries, but I should have looked more closely. For Germany five bibliographies were shown. HistBib contained bibliographies for only twelve countries with an additional bibliography for Eastern Europe. It soon becomes clear a number of links had not been updated, nor had there been any effort to widen its scope to cover more countries. Reading at the portal about a conference on historical bibliographies organized by the BBAW did not lighten up my mood, because this, too, did not work as a spur to update the portal and to maintain correct links to bibliographies and contributing organisations. Perhaps the portal was more a project for a couple of years than a lasting and durable presence in the virtual world. However, the BBAW does continue its online bibliographic service for the Jahresberichte für deutsche Geschichte.

Surely one of the leading thoughts to end the HistBib portal can have been the assumption that it is easy to find these European historical bibliographies with the Great and Omnipresent search firm. Surely some national libraries would provide the kind of list I expected, but often these institutions refer to HistBib. The news of its closure travels slow! In many other cases libraries put a small number of historical bibliographies in a list with often only an alphabetical order. Retaining the original names which are not necessarily in English is not helping you to find easily the right item, and often any comment is lacking, let alone an indication of open or licensed access.

Although telling the full tale of my brief quest for a complete overview replacing HistBib would be instructive, I think it is better to help you here with examples of a few helpful lists and commented overviews, and adding at the end my own concisely annotated list of current online historical bibliographies for a larger number of European countries.

Historicum, the portal with the Deutsche Historische Bibliographie, one of the five online bibliographies for German history, does you the service of not only mentioning the other four, and the twelve country bibliographies available at HistBib, but also links to other bibliographies for German history and further relevant resources. Heuristiek, the portal for historical heuristics at Ghent University, has a page with bibliographies for Early Modern history, alas only in alphabetical order and without comments, but at least with indications of those bibliographies only accessibie for staff and students of Ghent University. Another Belgian university, the Université de Liège, has in its Guide bibliographique en Histoire a page Bibliographies transpériodes with in clear sections both national and historical bibliographies for a number of European countries. The page contains a fair amount of useful comments and indications about bibliographies in print and online. For Scandinavian countries the Safir portal of Lund University proved most helpful. The page on Bok- och bibliothesväsen contains in clear sections with commented links what you expect from a research institution, inluding useful cross references.

It was a joy to see that the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford put in a blog post published in 2009 about an online bibliography for Spanish history a generous list of other similar online bibliographies. A few years ago I applauded here the online guides for British legal history created by the Bodleian Libraries. However, this information at first seemed not to have been included at the main website or in its LibGuides. In fact it looked like some of these bibliographies could not be traced at all at this website or in the research guides. Enter Oxford Bibliographies, but alas I could not quickly detect in this rich resource the kind of list provided elswehere in Oxford. In this case I hope sincerely I did not search properly, and I would be glad to put things right; luckily I could rather quickly find an overview for nine countries in the research guide of the Bodleian for Early Modern history.

One list?

My search for an overview at least giving you the information at HistBib was not as straightforward as you might like it to be. Among the most helpful resources are databases, but you are tempted to skip them because they do not always show up readily for online search engines. The German Datenbank-Infosystem (DBIS) proved to be helpful. The search results lead to separate pages with well-organized information about resources. Although sometimes you approach subjects from a more general level this does help you to broaden your vision.

The main answer to the question of finding one list is in the end simply negative. For some countries there is currently not any online historical bibliography, or even not one in print, or not anymore. Some countries were for centuries part of another country. Iceland in particular is an example. Some countries are too small to make efforts for a separate historical bibliography sensible at all, sometimes a historical bibliography has been integrated into a national bibliography or search portal. Often you will want to find literature for a particular period in European history or for a period in the history of a single country or a region. Using national bibliographies can mean you face nationalist influences, but you cannot evade nationalism by simply ignoring its existence. Creating a commented list of national bibliographies comes with the clear need for some annotation about creators, hosting institutions, time range and the presence of interface in more than one language. I am afraid I cannot immediately succeed in offering all these elements in my own attempt at a list. Many online research guides with a page for online bibliographies mention also union catalogues and digital libraries, and even mix them with each other. To me this seems a failure to see the need for clear distinction between national bibliographies, historical bibliographies, national meta-catalogues and digital portals. It is not just a matter of personal taste that information becomes more valuable by its structure, presentation and annotation.

In my memory in the eighties going to the card catalogue at Utrecht University Library implied you had to pass first the stacks with printed bibliographies. Thus even if you did not use them you could not be totally unaware of them. Faithful readers will recognize my quib about those people who know and use bibliographies and those who do not. I suppose this memory influences me in wanting to see or create this overview. You might think I prefer web pages with relevant information, but having tagged information in a database is more powerful. Over the years I have become more aware of the hard work done by librarians, catalogers and bibliographers to help scholars. Bibliographical resources can be extremely helpful for your research, not in the least by showing you contexts and the fact you can build on or critically review earlier relevant publications. Bibliographies are as important as (meta-)-catalogues and online repositories. 

A provisional list

While working on this post and gathering information concerning online historical country bibliographies I surely realized bibliographies in print can still be very important, too. The list here below has a clear focus as one of its qualities. Another wish for creating a similar list of online bibliographies for legal history for particular, too, grew on my mind. I do mention some examples on my legal history website Rechtshistorie, mainly on the pages for digital libraries, the history of the common law and Old Dutch law. However that may be, I prefer to stick to the purpose of this post. As for the new list with for now just concise comments and indications, it is surely open for comments, corrections and enhancements, and I am still contemplating the right permanent spot for it, perhaps here at the page with research guides. At my website the page for digital libraries seems the logical location, because you can find there already useful overviews of gateways to official gazettes, constitutions, foreign treaties, and a number of bibliographies for early printed books. A search for a bibliography for early printed books from Sweden eventually led to this post and this list, however uneven and in some details surely amusing, too. It is funny to see at least one database which has been integrated into another one some years ago yet still existing also on its own. It is disturbing to note the second bibliography for this country is scheduled for disappearance in its current form by June 30, 2021. In this respect my Dutch view in this post is not happy.

The opening of this list with two websites for Eastern Europe is a tribute to online research portals for Eastern European and Slavic studies. I was much impressed by the country guides for this region created by the International and Area Studies Library at the University of Illinois, Urbana, IL.

A postscript

Amazingly the HistBib portal could again be visited at is old web address in November 2021, without any modification. The Dutch Royal Library announced the DBNG will eventually resurface as part of the Dutch GGC cataloguing system hosted by OCLC, without indicating a timeline or a new URL. Here below I added a resource for finding articles on Icelandic history.

European historical bibliographies online

Eastern Europe

– Bibliotheks- und Bibliographie-Portal, Herder-Institut für historische Ostmitteleuropaforschung, Marburg – https://hds.hebis.de/herder/index.php – publications since 1994
– The European Bibliography of Slavic and East European Studies (EBSEES) – https://ebsees.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/ – functioning between 1991 and 2007, no longer updated; interface English

Austria

– Österreichische Historische Bibliographie (ÖHB), Universität Klagenfurt – http://oehb.aau.at/ – from 1945 onwards

Belgium

– Bibliografie van de Geschiedenis van België / Bibliographie de l’Histoire de Belgique (BGB-BHB) – http://www.rbph-btfg.be/nl_biblio.html – covers 1952-2008; interface Dutch, French and English
– BGB-BHB, Archives de l’État en Belgique – https://biblio.arch.be/webopac/Vubis.csp?Profile=BHBBGB&OpacLanguage=dut – publications since 2009; interface Dutch, French, German and English

Czech Republic

– Bibliografie dějin Českých zemí (BDCZ), Czech Academy of Sciences – https://biblio.hiu.cas.cz/ – interface Czech, English and German – with also digitized bibliographical yearbooks 

Denmark

– Dansk Historisk Bibliografi , Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Copenhagen- https://aleph.kb.dk/F/?func=file&file_name=welcome&local_base=dhb01

France

– Bibliographie annuelle de l’Histoire de France (BHF), CNRS and Bibliothèque nationale de France – https://biblio-bhf.fr/ – search interface in English

Germany

– Jahresberichte für Deutsche Geschichte (JBG), Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften – http://jdgdb.bbaw.de/cgi-bin/jdg/cgi-bin/jdg – publications 1949-2015; interface German and English
– Jahresberichte für Deutsche Geschichte (JDG), BBAW, Berlin – vol. 1-14 (1925-1938) – http://pom.bbaw.de/JDG/
– Historische Bibliographie Online, Oldenburg Wissenschaftsverlag and Arbeitsgemeeinschaft historischer Forschungseinrichtungen (AHF) – https://historische-bibliographie.degruyter.com/ – publications since 1990, no longer updated since 2015
– Deutsche Historische Bibliographie (DHB), Historicum – https://www.historicum.net/dhb/ – with links to other (regional) bibliographies, in particular the Virtuelle Deutsche Landesbibliographie, and other bibliographic resources – a simple search in the search field of the top menu bar leads to the beta version of an interface in German and English
– Bibliographischer Informationsdienst, Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Munich – https://www.ifz-muenchen.de/bibliothek/literatursuche/bibliografischer-informationsdienst – for 20th century history, access after registration, with a PDF-archive

Hungary

– Humanities Bibliographical Database (Humanus) – http://www.oszk.hu/humanus/index.html – with a section for history; interface Hungarian, English and German
– EHM: Elektronikus Periodika Archivum (EPA) – Humanus – Matarka (for Hungarian journals since 1800) – http://ehm.ek.szte.hu/ehm?p=0 – a portal with access to Humanus and three other resources, in particular for journals

Iceland

– Íslandssaga í greinum [Icelandic history in articles], Gunnar Karlsson and Gudmundur Jónson, National University Reykjavik – https://soguslodir.hi.is/ritaskra/ – a database with 13,500 articles, updated until 2005, for some journals until 2015

Ireland

– Irish History Online, Royal irisch Academy, Dublin – https://www.ria.ie/irish-history-online – with links to external resources for Irish history

Italy

– Bibliografia Storica Nazionale (dal 2000) (BSN), Giunta Centrale per gli Studi Storici – https://www.gcss.it/easyweb/w7044/index.php?scelta=campi&&biblio=GSS&lang= – publications since 2000; interface Italian, English, German, French and Spanish
– BSN Catalogo Retrospettivo – https://www.gcss.it/easyweb/w7044/index.php?scelta=campi&&biblio=E7043&lang= – interface Italian, English, German, French and Spanish

Lithuania

– Lietuvos Istorijos Bibliografia – https://aleph.library.lt/F?func=option-update-lng&P_CON_LNG=LIT – interface Lithuanian and English

Netherlands

– Digitale Bibliografie Nederlandse Geschiedenis (DBNG), Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague and Huygens Institute, Amsterdam – https://www.dbng.nl – interface Dutch and English – no updates after 2016, end of current service June 30, 2021
– Historie in Titels (HinT) – http://picarta.nl/DB=3.30/LNG=NE/ – licensed resource, not anymore updated since 2005, originally created at the Universiteit van Amsterdam (UvA) – interface Dutch, English and German

Norway

– Historisk bibliografi (Norhist), Nasjonalbiblioteket, Oslo – https://www.nb.no/baser/norhist/ – for the period 1980-1997

Poland

– Bibliografia historii polskiej, Instytut Pamięci Narodowej – https://www.bibliografia.ipn.gov.pl/ – access seems to be currently unsafe or disabled; https://bibliografia.ipn.gov.pl/ appears with a notice “offline”

Spain

– Indice Histórico Español (IHE), Revistes Cientifiques de la Universitat de Barcelona – https://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/IHE/index – a bibliographical journal
– Modernitas: Bibliografia de Historia Moderna, Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales (CSIC) – http://www.moderna1.ih.csic.es/modernitas/principal.htm
– Indices, CSIC – https://indices.csic.es/ – a general scientific bibliography with attention to the humanities; interface Spanish and English

Sweden

– Svensk Historisk Bibliografi – digital 1771-2010 (SHBd), Kungliga Biblioteket, Stockholm – https://shb.kb.se/F/?func=file&file_name=find-b&local_base=shb – also available as an app

Switzerland

– Bibliographie der Schweizergeschichte (BSG), Schweizerische Nationalbibliothek, Bern – https://www.nb.admin.ch/snl/de/home/recherche/bibliografien/bsg.html – interface German, French, Italian and English

United Kingdom

– Bibliography of British and Irish History (BBIH) – https://www.history.ac.uk/publications/bibliography-british-and-irish-history – licensed resource hosted by Brepols