Diplomatische Studien zu den St. Galler Privaturkunden

Well over 800 documents from the time before the year 1000 have been preserved to this day in the archives of the former Abbey of St. Gall. It is an extraordinary stock of original charters that is subjected to a systematic diplomatic study for the first time in this book. The first three sections of the book deal with fundamental aspects of the documentary practices in early medieval Alemannia and examine in detail the external and internal features of the St. Gall charters (i.e. writing materials, scripts, graphic symbols, formulae). The following sections build on this basic diplomatic analysis, first tracing the development of the monastic (St. Gall) scriptorium and then examining the traces of non-monastic local writing activity. In this way, the contours of a historical Urkundenlandschaft Alemannia become tangible.