Medieval account books allow very diverse insights, into the everyday life of the monks as well as into the so-called "great" history. And last but not least, the economic affairs of a monastery are of course also extensively documented in these sources. The significance and source value of these texts is therefore very high. In addition, account books often allow insights that would otherwise be denied. Often - unintentionally and therefore all the more valuable - events and occurrences were documented that would otherwise be missing from the rest of the written tradition.

Aldersbach can be considered an ideal example of a Bavarian Cistercian monastery during the 15th century. Although the history of this monastery itself is comparatively poorly researched, the good tradition of the accounts in the 15th century itself, as well as the fact that Aldersbach, with around 80 servants, was a comparatively average religious community, which existed in comparable size hundreds of times throughout Europe, make the Lower Bavarian Cistercian monastery appear almost prototypical. (BL) Medieval accounts are a source whose edition requires both palaeographic and philological precision as well as highly structured data representation in at least tabular form: Without "close reading" of the source to document its edits (deletions and insertions), the tabular representation of the accounts cannot be reliable. The different questions that can be asked of the source additionally demands that the information in the accounts can be easily filtered and aggregated.

Simple solutions to this task are digital editions with standard spreadsheets. However, research in the DH has shown that the procedures of encoding in XML/TEI, which are common in digital editing, can better represent the palaeographic and philological findings and that the structured data can be accessed more flexibly in a database management system. The project will therefore automatically generate transcriptions using the hand-written text recognition software Transkribus and then manually check transcriptions. They will be exported from Transkribus in XML/TEI format. A social and economic history dissertation with the working title "Living and working in a late medieval monastery. An economic and social history of the Aldersbach monastery 1449-1567".

The aim of this work is firstly to work out the economic foundations of the monastery over time. The main questions will be whether (and if so, why) the monastery's economy underwent structural change and, in particular, whether the changes in intercontinental long-distance trade were already reflected (new goods, "price revolution"). Secondly, the social structure of the almost 100 employees should be worked out. Ideally, it will also be possible to determine real incomes for certain occupational groups and thus contribute to the international research on living standards in the pre-modern era, which has been booming for a good twenty years. The basis for the economic and social-historical analyses are the account books of the monastery, which are available almost in their entirety until 1512 (in Latin) and then again from 1552 to 1567 (in German). They are to be digitised and (after learning the software) automatically transcribed and then also analysed semi-automatically with the help of new DH procedures.