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.