Never assume...
Aug. 13th, 2017 07:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ossamentaThis last week has been fun but busy: in the day I'm taking a summer course on Scandinavian manuscripts at Copenhagen University (more on that later), and in the evenings I've been going through the Swedish National Archives medieval charters database, from which I will select charters for scientific analysis. Consequently, my eyes are tired and my mouse-finger sore. But I still have lots of records to go through, so I suspect that next week will follow the same pattern.
Being somewhat naive, I assumed that the database would contain the charters that the National archives had in their stores, and did my calculations on the total sum/year/town when I prepared my grant applications and talked to the conservators. That was not quite the case... :-(
It turns out that the database contains charters that were written in or sent to places and persons in Sweden (present-day, i.e. including those parts that were Danish in the Middle Ages). Once I got a look at the individual records I found out that some of those charters are in the Vatican Library, Lübeck, Berlin etc. Others turned out to be later copies or even post-medieval prints, which makes them perfectly functional if you're after the actual words, but useless for my purposes. Some are written on paper, not parchment (useless for my protein analyses, useful for other parts of the PhD).
At least there's some good news: Even if in some cases only half the records in the database actually correspond to a parchment document in the National Archives, I'm still within my sample number allowance. Unfortunately, many of the 12th and 13th century records from Lund are lost (turned out to be later copies), but I hope the samples from those charters can be switched to samples from books.
Being somewhat naive, I assumed that the database would contain the charters that the National archives had in their stores, and did my calculations on the total sum/year/town when I prepared my grant applications and talked to the conservators. That was not quite the case... :-(
It turns out that the database contains charters that were written in or sent to places and persons in Sweden (present-day, i.e. including those parts that were Danish in the Middle Ages). Once I got a look at the individual records I found out that some of those charters are in the Vatican Library, Lübeck, Berlin etc. Others turned out to be later copies or even post-medieval prints, which makes them perfectly functional if you're after the actual words, but useless for my purposes. Some are written on paper, not parchment (useless for my protein analyses, useful for other parts of the PhD).
At least there's some good news: Even if in some cases only half the records in the database actually correspond to a parchment document in the National Archives, I'm still within my sample number allowance. Unfortunately, many of the 12th and 13th century records from Lund are lost (turned out to be later copies), but I hope the samples from those charters can be switched to samples from books.