For anyone dealing with medieval royal diplomatics, confirmation charters are a very common thing. Whenever a new ruler was appointed, one of his first acts was to renew charters that had once been given by his predecessors and which were now presented to him for confirmation. While through its renewal a document achieved new legal…
One of the prime objectives of the HERA project is to show that in the tenth century, the past and its uses gained importance in the absence of clear administrative or legal structures, as action in the present often drew authority and legitimacy from claims about the past. The ways that contemporaries chose to use…
Thousands of royal diplomas survive from tenth- and eleventh-century Europe, and are a vital source for medieval historians. These diplomas vary greatly in their length, style, appearance and content, depending on where they were issued, and by whom. Below is a more or less comprehensive list of the parts one might find in a royal…
In most accounts of modern German historiography, the period of the Ottonian and Salian rulers is featured as a period of national origins. The perspective adopted by the HERA project, however, is different. Since it focuses on the uses of the past, it allows us to look at this period from a different perspective. The…
Historians have often framed tenth-century England in far more positive terms than scholars examining contemporary continental Europe. Often characterised in terms of cultural renewal, this was also the century in which ‘England’ emerged as a political entity for the first time; combined, the two offer a heady mix for those seeking a nation-focussed narrative. Within…
