Digitised charters
e-chartae – digital charters from the Abbey Archives
In 2018, when preparations were underway for a new exhibition room at St.Gallen Abbey Archives, the archive staff also launched the digitisation project e-chartae. The purpose of e-chartae is to make all the Early Medieval documents in the Abbey Archives freely accessible on the Internet. This means that the only abbey archive from the Merovingian and Carolingian period to have survived with its original holdings intact is entirely available online. Over 1000 communities around Lake Constance and beyond can now access the records that mention them for the first time along with evidence of early settlement and the first known names of local inhabitants.
The Early Medieval documents from the Abbey Archives are reproduced to a high standard of resolution, so that details such as erasure or a change of ink are easy to recognise. Further information about each document is administered in a database. This tool for the international study of historical documents can be regularly improved and expanded. In the medium term, the full text of these charters will be provided together with translations into German, French and English. We are very grateful for corrections, suggestions and translations of documents.