The Development of Charter Practice in Late Medieval Krems-Stein (ca. 1250-1430)

This doctoral project examines the closely interconnected towns of Krems and Stein as a setting for the spread of literacy in the urban sphere, with a particular focus on the production of charters. Rather than concentrating on the documentary practices of a single institution - such as the town council, the parish, or a monastery - the project seeks, insofar as the surviving sources permit, to investigate the development of charter production across the entire town and beyond its walls into the surrounding hinterland.

It is assumed that the spread of literacy, and thus of charter production, did not proceed in isolation within individual institutions. Instead, numerous interconnections existed among different producers of charters, and the extensive and highly specialized knowledge required for the formulation, production, and drafting of charters was shared, disseminated, and imitated. The project aims to identify specific places or individuals within, and possibly beyond, the town as centres of charter production, to understand the diffusion of documentary practices within the complex network of the urban community, and to describe the development of this category of sources.