Die Wiener Stadtbücher 1395-1430, Part 6: 1422-1427

The edition of the "Vienna City Books" contains the reproduction of handwritten records of legal life in late medieval Vienna, compiled by legally trained city clerks on behalf of the city council. These records, covering the period from December 1395 to April 1430, are preserved in three handwritten folio volumes, kept in the Vienna City Archives. These codices comprise more than 1,700 leaves, containing more than 4,500 entries. In two-thirds of the cases, they are testaments drafted according to the contemporary customary law. For this reason, these codes were formerly often referred to as "testament books." However, they are not wills that confer legal successions to the entire estate of a deceased person, but rather collective legacies; they only "transact" individual parts or specific items of the estate the beneficiaries and therefore the people called them "transactions." The "Vienna City Books" also contain a variety of entries concerning other legal acts of a private nature, primarily in the areas of family and inheritance law, such as the division of estates or proof of kinship relationships for the purpose of asserting inheritance claims for citizens who died in Vienna. Over and all these include the appointment of guardians and determinations of a person`s legal age and resulting capacity to enter legal transactions. However, numerous entries also concern matters of public law, legal acts issued by the sovereign princes or estates, or by the city council. In the early 1980s, this project was initiated by Professor Wilhelm Brauneder (legal historian at the University of Vienna) together with Gerhard Jaritz (medievalist at the Institute for Material Culture of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Krems and later professor at the Central European University in Budapest). Since 1985, Christian Neschwara has been involved, initially as Wilhelm Brauneder`s assistant, and since his appointment as professor (1998) as co-editor, and since 2006 solely with Gerhard Jaritz. Jaritz is responsible for the critical transcription of the entries and for producing a print-ready manuscript, while Neschwara`s task is to describe the content in regesta and to provide indexes and lists for the entries. The edition currently comprises six volumes with more than 4,000 entries (from 1395 to 1427), already encompassing 90% of the manuscript texts. One more volume is to be produced, containing the remaining entries (up to 1430), as well as an introduction with descriptions of the manuscripts and indexes (terms related to material culture as well as to customary law). For preliminary reference, a complete index of entries and a legal-historical glossary are available online.