Description

Duration: from 1 October 2020 ongoing

What made people stick together in medieval towns? What forms of belonging tied them together? Charters and administrative records document the entanglements of urban groups and, because they have survived in high numbers, it is possible to analyse them quantitatively. Basedon a pilot project funded by the City of Vienna, we are systematically recording information from two corpora of source material: the Quellen zur Geschichte der Stadt Wien (Sources of the History of the City of Vienna, QGStW) and the so-called “Testament Books” , (1395-1430) as part of the Wiener Stadtbücher (Viennese City Books).The types of data we are collecting provide information kinship, gender relations, communities of property and spiritual economy. The projectinnovatively combines prosopography, social network analysis and digital humanities and, thus,also contributes to the optimisation of data structures as well as the editorial and servicefunctions of monasterium.net, the largest online charter database in Europe.