In celebration of the 200th birthday of Theodor Sickel (1826-1908), the conference will focus on developments in the methodology of diplomatics, discussing which methods fit to what kind of diplomatic material and research question, collecting exceptional results of the application of existing methods, confronting old and new methods, reflecting on how to evaluate digital methods and their impact on the current diplomatics methodologies, etc. By discussing applications and effects of individual methods applied in diplomatics research, we hope to refine and renew the general methodological framework of diplomatics.
Diplomatics is an old field of research. Its main methodology is usually centered around the concept of discrimen veri ac falsi and was designed in the bella diplomatica of the 17th century by Dom Jean Mabillon. He introduced comparison of contemporary habits of authentication, writing, or linguistic style as the main method of diplomatics. Palaeography and textual analysis (“diplomatic discourse”) are at the core of diplomatics methodology. This includes, for instance, the creation of typologies describing the expectations for individual documents. However, the long history of diplomatics has seen changes, additions and shifts in its methodology: Sickel’s concept of “Kanzleimäßigkeit” narrowed the method from a generic comparison to the detailed analysis of chancery practices and the individuals creating the charters, which also has a strong tradition in Spanish diplomatics. Critical scholarly editing is an independent strand of diplomatics, which combines the methodologies for discrimen veri ac falsi with methods of textual criticism: reflecting on the tradition of the texts, establishment of a reliable text, and provision of abstracts of the content. The crisis of diplomatics in the 1960’s (Bartoloni, Bautier, Fichtenau, Petrucci) fostered the search for the application of diplomatics methods to other material than charters and to other temporal contexts than the middle ages. Comparative methods have been refined in Pierre Chaplais’ work on different English chanceries. Alessandro Pratesi brought forward social and intellectual context as an analytical framework for diplomatics, while still focussing on the representational and probative function of the charters and the formal rigor in individual analysis. From the 1990s onwards, scholars such as Peter Rück, Olivier Guyotjeannin, and Laurent Morelle have pushed forward the conceptualization of diplomatics as cultural history and thus added the analysis of cultural practices around the act of documentation and the use of charters to the methods of diplomatics. While Attilio Bartoli Langeli promoted the historical rooting of the discipline, Giovanna Nicolaj has pushed the legal framework of diplomatics to the foreground. The most recent contributions to diplomatics methodology are sparked by the digitisation of archival holdings and scholarly engagement with them. Digital diplomatics in this sense is searching for appropriate representations of parchments, seals, texts and the actions represented by them, and the analytical tools that open new perspectives. Luciana Duranti has used the “digital diplomatics” label to transfer analytical criteria of diplomatics like authenticity to archival science to understand digital documentary practices better. This conference will study the development and the state of the art of diplomatic methodology in all its facets.
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