In addition to Roman and canonical law, the Sachsenspiegel (reported in the Eastern Harz foreland between 1220 and 1235) and the famous town charter of Magdeburg (developed in the town of Magdeburg and decisively shaped by the spellings of the local court chair between the 13th and 15th centuries) form the common foundations of Central and Eastern European legal systems. Simultaneously with the…
The German Dictionary is a historical dictionary of the meaning of the New High German language. It contains the common German vocabulary from the middle of the 15th century to the present in alphabetical order. It was planned and started by the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, who are regarded as the founders of German studies. According to their imagination and model, the dictionary presents…
Written sources are – like art and buildings – integral parts of the cultural heritage, whose preservation, indexing and provision are central social duties. The knowledge of the past is principally based on texts, that more or less accidentally escaped destruction. These records preserve the knowledge, the faith, the tales, the visions and dreams of the people. They give testimony of past…
Until the 17th century, the astronomical and astrological works of Claudius Ptolemaeus (2nd century CE) were central source texts for the scientific understanding of the world of Arabic-Islamic and Latin-Christian cultures. The project studies the Arabic and Latin versions of Ptolemy’s major works, the Almagest and the Tetrabiblos, the minor works and pseudepigrapha, as well as the extensive…
The aim of REGESTA IMPERII is to record all documented and historiographically documented activities of the Roman-German kings and emperors from the Carolingians up to Maximilian I. (approx. 751-1519) as well as of selected popes in the form of German “Regesten” (abstracts).
The starting point of the undertaking is strongly connected with the name of the Frankfurt municipal librarian Friedrich…
The repertory "Historical Sources of the German Middle Ages" lists the narrative sources which originated from the time of Charlemagne to Emperor Maximilian I (i.e. approx. 750 to 1519) in the territory of the medieval Frankish and German Empires or which concern German medieval history. To date, the catalogue contains more than 5,300 works in Latin and German, including the "Carmina Burana" and…
The research project is supervised by an institution of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Its objective is the establishment of a tripartite analytic-semantic handbook, which essentially provides a new foundation for the history of towns and urbanization during the premodern period. Additionally, it constitutes an important instrument for a multitude of historically oriented…