The Ninth-Century Charters in St. Gall

The corpus of early-medieval charters of the abbey of St. Gall is unique in many respects. Today, the archive of the abbey holds 839 charters from the period before 920 AD, that is by far the largest early-medieval archive of original charters north of the Alps. The great number of persons mentioned in these documents allows us to reconstruct the fate, conduct and mentality of individuals and of social groups and networks and offer a basis for prosopographic study. For the historian of law, these charters document a variety of legal transactions and dispute settlements; the philologist will find exactly-datable language forms with precise dates; the diplomatist and the paleographer can observe the development of script and the extent of literacy, the practice of transactions and their documentation, the keeping and the further use of charters and much more. In 1863-66, the charters were edited by Wartmann in the "Urkundenbuch der Abtei St. Gallen", but now, a new edition following modern criteria seems auspicable. First of all, a facsimile edition should document form and appearance of the charters to provide a basis for wide-ranging research. The edition will be part of the established series of the "Chartae Latinae Antiquiores" (ChLA). The eighth-century charters have already been edited in this series half a century ago; now, the series editors have entrusted the Forschungsstelle für Geschichte des Mittelalters der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften with the facsimile edition of the ninth-century ones. The three- year project proposed here should serve as a pilot project and lead to the publication of at least two volumes containing about 80 charters. Furthermore, the project is intended, with the support of several international researchers, to explore the manifold perspectives opened by an intense technical study of the charters. Following the approach developed at the Forschungsstelle sources in their original manuscript form will be analyzed with technical precision, and a number of current research problems will be addressed on this basis. Therefore, the aim of the project is not simply to edit the ChLA volumes but also to conduct a number of specific studies that bring new insights into the practice of documentation in Carolingian society and into the cultural context of the charters on the basis of their minute analysis and comparison with similar bodies of evidence (e.g. Lucca, Milan).

The archives of the former Monastery of St Gall contain by far the largest collection of original Carolingian private charters from North of the Alps. These charters were published 1863-66 by Hermann Wartmann in a sound, but now outdated edition. Furthermore, half a century ago the St Gall charters of the eighth century were edited as facsimiles by Albert Bruckner and Robert Marichal as part of the famous series Chartae Latinae Antiquiores (ChLA). A main objective of this project consisted in extending Bruckner`s and Marichal`s work with a facsimile edition of the St Gall charters of the ninth century. Two new ChLA volumes have been completed: volume 100 and 101 (101 forthcoming) contain the St Gall charters of the period from 800 to 820. The facsimile-edition presents a facsimile of each charter with a transcription and a detailed commentary. In this way it provides the basis for a wide range of further research in multiple disciplines. An important result of the edition and a central aspect of this research project was identifying and investigating two distinct groups of scribes that produced these charters, monastic scribes and non-monastic scribes. The identification and classification of scribes and charters was facilitated by a new, or profoundly improved, understanding of the St Gall charter material (especially the development of the scripts, of the formularies that lay behind, the charter texts, of the judicial procedure, etc.). After 816, the year when Gozbert became abbot of St Gall, evidence for non-monastic scribes starts to disappear from the St Gall charter material. The production of charters for the monastery became a task of the monks themselves. Therefore, the second half of the project focussed on the development of the St Gall scriptorium in these years (scribes, scripts, organization, products). For this approach not only the charter evidence itself was consulted, but also manuscripts of the library of St Gall that were produced by the same scribes who produced the charters. The project`s results encourage us to revisit and reconsider Heinrich Brunner`s and Heinrich Fichtenau`s models of Urkundenkreise or Urkundenlandschaften, that is: regions in which private charters share the same characteristics. They were by no means as static as it has been widely assumed - to the contrary: they were remarkably dynamic. As such, they might provide us with an important key to early medieval literacy and administrative culture.