Over 6,000 charters and 13,000 analysed documents representing a mine of information for studying the medieval history of Western Europe.
The Thesaurus Diplomaticus includes A. Wauters's monumental work, the Table Chronologique des Chartes et Diplômes imprimés concernant l'histoire de la Belgique, providing textual and chronological analysis of all the edited pre-1350 charters which deal with Belgium but also unedited documents kept as originals or as copy. It contains the complete transcribed text of all those charters that have been studied within the Belgian Dictionnaire du Latin médiéval Project and photographs of the original documents whenever available.
The publication of this database with material coming from various sources results from a consortium that was established in 1983 to upgrade Wauters's material and make it more accesible. The group linked the Belgian Commission Royale d'Histoire, the Belgian Comité national du Dictionnaire du Latin médiéval and Cetedoc at the Université Catholique de Louvain at Louvain-La-Neuve.
The first part of the database, the 'diplomatic files', contains descriptive analyses of each document in the database. This analysis covers names of the authors, recipients and other parties to the act, dates mentioned in or attributed to the document, place-names etc. The second part, the 'text file', contains the complete searchable text of all the charters studied as part of the Dictionnaire du Latin médiéval Project. The third part is the 'Image File' containing photographs of the original charter and offers a wonderful resource for palaeographic purposes.
The Thesaurus Diplomaticus will expand its chronological and geographical range in the future. On the one hand it will treat charters post-1200 and later and it will extend Wauters's own 1350 limit and move from there into the early modern period. On the other hand, it will break away from using modern Belgian boundaries to historically coherent borders, following those of the principalities and bishopries of the southern low Countries.
The Thesaurus Diplomaticus has been developed in collaboration with Cetedoc.
The contents of the CD-ROM are now included in the Library of Latin Texts Online.