Digitising Records of Low German Municipal Assemblies
The hitherto digitised resolutions of Hanseatic Diets are freely available and searchable online:
The significance of municipal diets
Municipal assemblies, so-called ‘diets’ (‘Tagfahrten’ in German), were among the most important political events in the Middle Ages and early modern period. During these meetings, representatives of the cities met to discuss common issues, resolve conflicts and make decisions. These assemblies were particularly
important for the cities dominated by Low German merchants – predominantly the Hanseatic Diets. From the 14th to the 17th century, minutes of the proceeding were taken at these assemblies: the so-called ‘Hanserezesse’ (Hanseatic Resolutions). These documents are unique testimonies to urban cooperation, trade and political decision-making, and thus one of the most important sources for Hanseatic research.
Sources: the archival record
Working with the Hanseatic Resolutions is problematic for researchers, as they were only edited up to 1537 and the editions are now also partly viewed critically by scholars. Access to the sources is also made difficult by their large number and decentralised preservation: over 130 German and international archives have been identified to date that hold manuscripts with Hanseatic Resolutions. The archive of the Hanseatic city of Lübeck alone holds over 100 of these documents. In addition to the Resolutions of the General Hanseatic Diets, the project also covers other types of assemblies – from regional diets to spontaneously convened meetings between towns.
Project objectives
The project aims to make the Hanseatic recesses digitally available in a central location and consists of two components:
- Systematic recording: First, all known resolutions are recorded in a database. This creates an inventory of the manuscripts and diets, which is created using the modular database nodegoat.
- Digitisation and publication: In the next step, the resolution are comprehensively digitally processed. The documents are scanned by the archives and then transcribed at the FGHO, either manually or using an Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) techniques. Both the work of the Citizen Science project
Hanse.Quellen.Lesen! and the results of the international research project ‘The Flow’ feed in to the project here.
Results
The database with Hanseatic Resolutions created during the project will be made freely available over the course of the project. The documents that have already been fully digitised and transcribed can be found on
our Transkribus site and will be supplemented gradually.