The Accounts of Aldersbach Monastery

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Mark Spoerer
• Subject Area: Economic and Social History ; Early Modern History ; Medieval History
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 534939049

Medieval account books offer a myriad of insights, not only into quotidian monastic life but also into what is colloquially referred to as "grand" history. Primarily, these sources provide a comprehensive documentation of the economic operations of a particular monastery. As such, these texts represent highly pertinent and invaluable historical data. These records, often replete with minute details, can be instrumental for numerous historical disciplines. It is therefore an often research request to make these texts available as digital data. A meticulous examination of Aldersbach's accounts is set to augment current research in two key aspects. The extant monastery's subsequent account books, which are largely intact from 1449–1513 and then again from 1552–67, house a wealth of data on prices and wages. Based on a typical regional basket of goods, this data will facilitate the computation of actual wages. Of particular interest are the detailed contracts that the Abbey negotiated with its familiares. These contracts itemise all expected services and the corresponding remuneration, enabling the precise determination of the living standards not only of the lower classes but also of higher-ranking occupational groups. Transkribus, a software suite designed for the digitisation of historical documents, uses Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) technology to extract text from scanned documents and convert this content into an encoded digital format. In this project, automated transcriptions of the accounts are generated in this manner. The objective of the Digital Humanities (DH) processing the transcriptions is to distil data structures that are amenable to analysis by social and economic historians. From a pre-modern social and economic history viewpoint, wages and prices constitute crucial data. Utilising the edition's dataset, it will be feasible to extrapolate the monetary values listed for these services in the accounts to annual wages for the recipient annotated in the edition. The findings of the economic history thesis bearing the provisional title “Life and Work in the Late Medieval Monastery: An Economic and Social History of Aldersbach Monastery 1449–1567” will be published upon the project's conclusion. The abundant preservation of the monastery's accounts, coupled with the fact that during this period, Aldersbach was a fairly average-sized religious community with around 50 employees (similar-sized communities were widespread across Europe), renders this Lower Bavarian monastery a veritable prototype. The application of HTR to decipher the challenging-to-read Latin-language account books, and the automated data processing by the DH for an economic and social history categorisation based on this, can be considered highly efficient and decidedly innovative in this combination.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Austria
• Cooperation Partner: Privatdozent Dr. Robert Klugseder