The Index Librorum Civitatum. Index of town records of the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Times, a tool for basic historical research

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Andreas Ranft
• Subject Area: Medieval History ; Early Modern History
• Term: since 2016
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 272371589

The project Index Librorum Civitatum (ILC) aims to establish a freely accessible online database and innovative research tool, which documents for the first time the medieval and early modern (approx. 1300 to about 1800) town records (libri civitatis) for the entire area of the Federal Republic of Germany, independently from their contemporary depository. With the addition of record overviews, finding aids, critical editions and research literature the database will be expanded to a comprehensive list of references of the medieval and early modern city focused on constitutional and administrative history. The systematic indexing of town records as well as their scholarly contextualization will be understood as an elementary form of historical basic research. Thereby a crucial but untapped type of source will be made accessible for a wide curricular and cross-disciplinary research, which will give a new stimulus to the historical research.In the successive phases of the project the scholars of the project team are going to do special studies, which on the one hand advance the content of the database through systematic recording of town records and the corresponding research literature/critical editions. On the other hand special issues are to be investigated by these researches, giving stimuli on the methodological and theoretical discussions on the facets of pragmatic literacy in the context of the libri civitatis research. The geographical area of selected studies will go beyond the territory of the Federal Republic of Germany in order to contextualize the European phenomenon of the liber civitatis in international scholarly exchange and comparison. The main issues of these studies are especially questions about media, contexts, and agencies of administrative recordings, as well as the ways and mechanisms of appropriation, transformation and development of certain forms of administrative writing as a cultural practice from the 13th to the end of the 17th century.Exploiting the opportunities of the ILC database in the framework of these basic researches will help to deploy the knowledge potentials of libri civitatis in particular concerning a broad spectrum of social and cultural-historical questions.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Poland
• Co-Investigators: Professor Dr. Patrick Sahle; Dr. Henning Steinführer
• Cooperation Partner: Professorin Dr. Krystyna Chojnicka