Diplomata Belgica
Diplomata Belgica. The Diplomatic Sources from the Medieval Southern Low Countries, ed. by Thérèse de Hemptinne, Jeroen Deploige, Jean-Louis Kupper and Walter Prevenier (Brussels: Royal Historical Commission, since 2015).
The database Diplomata Belgica constitutes the updated continuation of two prior publications directed by the Belgian Royal Historical Commission: the Table chronologique des chartes et diplômes imprimés concernant l’histoire de la Belgique, initiated by Alphonse Wauters and published in eleven volumes between 1866 and 1971, and the CD-ROM Thesaurus Diplomaticus (Brepols 1997), edited by Paul Tombeur, Philippe Demonty, Walter Prevenier and Marie-Paul Laviolette in collaboration with the “Comité National du Latin Médiéval” and the former Cetedoc (“Centre de Traitement électronique des Documents”) at the Université Catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve.
critical survey
Diplomata Belgica offers a critical survey of all the diplomatic sources, edited or still unpublished, and issued by both natural persons and legal bodies from the medieval Southern Low Countries. Diplomata Belgica covers present day Belgium as well as those areas which belonged historically to the Southern Low Countries but are part now of France (French Flanders, French Hainault), the Netherlands (parts of the provinces of Zeeland, Noord-Brabant, Limburg), the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, or Germany (parts of the Rhineland).
At this stage, Diplomata Belgica contains metadata about almost 35,000 charters and deeds in Latin, Old-French, Middle Dutch and Middle High German, almost 19,000 full text transcriptions and almost 5,000 photographs of original charters. The database aims at exhaustivity for the period before 1250 and will, in the future, also include late medieval diplomatic materials without striving after completeness.
