The early charters of the cathedral chapter of Aquileia

This edition contains the older documents relating to the cathedral chapter of Aquileia and the Benedictine monastery of Beligna near Aquileia, which was later incorporated into it. The period extends from 1031 to the middle of the 13th century. Text editions of this kind are an important prerequisite for historical research, because they collect widely scattered texts and make them available in a commentary format. The term document was deliberately defined broadly in this publication: inscriptions of legal significance were therefore also included, as well as a list of numerous donations made to the cathedral chapter over the course of around 130 years. This publication is the fourth volume of the preliminary works on a Urkundenbuch of the Patriarchate of Aquileia. It thus complements the existing series of editions of documents from Friulian churches up to the middle of the 13th century. About half of the texts or extracts from documents contained here were previously completely unknown to researchers. In addition, several texts have now been edited verbatim for the first time, and others are now available thanks to a much better textual basis than before, or they now appear with a corrected date. Several studies round off the text edition: for example, a presentation of previous research on the cathedral chapter and on the Beligna monastery, further investigations into the inventories of the chapter archive (from the 16th to the 18th century) and also into the history of this archive. In addition, there are special studies on the content and evaluation of individual important documents and groups of documents, including the reality of those documents that have only been handed down in works of stylistic art, and also on those documents that have previously been wrongly attributed to the cathedral chapter or the Beligna monastery or to the period up to 1250. The notarial symbols from the period up to 1250 are shown, regardless of whether they have been handed down in the original or as more recent copies. Of course, not only the names of places and people that appear in the texts are indexed and identified, but also the peculiarities of medieval legal language in its phrase formation. Such indexes have by no means become superfluous thanks to the modern possibilities of electronic searches directly in the texts. When it comes to names, the indexes provide an overview of their different spellings, personal names are linked to specific people and the very often difficult to understand location information is localized. A great deal of emphasis was placed on indexes of words and phrases. Due to the often very complex sentence structures, an electronic search for specific phrases directly in the texts would largely be doomed to failure.