The Study of Documents (Diplomatics)

In our film we observed the scholarly analysis of a charter. Methods for the text-critical and source-critical analysis of charters make up a field known as diplomatics. When historians use the term charter, they mean "a piece of writing drawn up in a particular form, witnessed and therefore of binding import, that documents a legal act of procedure" (Goetz). Charters have their roots in antiquity and were produced and used throughout the Middle Ages. The spectrum of medieval issuers of charters reaches from the emperor to private persons. Charters, written proof of legal acts, were used as a basic means of legitimating legal and political claims.

This specific function also produced, over the course of the Middle Ages, a large number of forged charters. Hand in hand with this development, people began to look for criteria that could be used to determine the authenticity of charters. However, scholars place the beginnings of 'diplomatics' as a discipline in the 17th century. At that time, the French Benedictine monk Jean Mabillon began systematically to develop criteria for the critical examination of charters, among other scholarly activities. From his work grew a highly successful work called
De re diplomatica libri VI' , which finally gave a name to diplomatics. A digitalized version of this book has been made available by the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin.