Dissertation Project

The Incubation Period of Diplomatics from an Epistemic History Perspective – Case Studies (working title)

The dissertation project examines the medieval handling of document fraud from an epistemic history perspective. Using this approach, selected cases of forgeries from the 9th to the 12th century will be analyzed. Although the history of knowledge is a relatively young branch of historical cultural studies compared to other fields, it is gaining increasing attention and offers innovative approaches to the study of diplomatics. However, its application in the field of diplomatics remains a research desideratum.

In the context of the current societal discourse on Fake News, disinformation, and Post-Truth Politics, as well as how to address them, the enduring relevance of this topic becomes apparent—a topic that also played a significant role in the Middle Ages in the context of Diplomatics. Charters hold special significance as the most frequent and important sources for medieval history, as they served as instruments for asserting or realizing political, legal, and economic claims. However, it was not only in the Early Modern Period, with the monumental work De re diplomatica (1681) by the Dominican monk Jean Mabillon (1632–1707), that knowledge about document forgery was developed through the distinction between the genuine and the false (discrimen veri ac falsi), paving the way for diplomatics as a fundamental scholarly discipline. Knowledge about document forgery already existed in the Middle Ages, circulated, and was applied to varying degrees in practice. The focus of the investigation is on the question of what knowledge was available to contemporaries for evaluating documents and what practices and criteria they used to identify forgeries. The aim of my project is to explore what was considered knowledge about genuine and false documents by contemporaries in their respective periods.