Digital Scholarly Edition of Ulrich Richental´s Chronicle of the Council of Constance

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Thomas Martin Buck
• Subject Area: Medieval History ; German Medieval Studies (Medieval German Literature)
• Term: from 2013 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 246544555

The so-called lists of participants of the Council of Constance (1414-1418) are a considerable, but as yet almost unresearched evidence of writing culture in the Late Middle Ages. They have come upon us in dozens of textual witnesses and several divergent versions. In scholarly discussion, these directories are referred to as lists of participants of the Council of Constance, but in fact, they are no synodal records. Instead, they represent the result of an attempt by the Roman king Sigismund and the town council of Constance to record not only the fathers of the synod, but all spiritual and secular visitors who came to the town during the years of the gathering. The dissertation project aims at documenting and describing these directories, which are only partially known to the scholarly discussion, and at examining the status of the single textual witnesses in the process of the lists genesis and tradition. By exemplarily examining the methods how people in the pre-modern era collected large amounts of data, analysing the reasons why they did so and focussing on how medieval historiography dealt with these lists later on, the study also strives to make a contribution to the field of the culture of writing in the Late Middle Ages. To complete this study, a one year prolongation (2017-10-01 to 2018-09-30) of the project is requested.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants