Digital Edition of the Augsburg Master Builder’s Ledgers available online

The Augsburg master builder's ledgers (BMB) are invaluable testimonies of the economic, financial, social, and art history of medieaval and early modern times. So far, the ledgers have only been available to visitors of the Augsburg city archive – now, the first five volumes are freely available to all interested online as a digital full-text edition via www.augsburger-baumeisterbuecher.de.

The manuscripts not only document every payment to and from the free city between 1320 and 1800, but they also convey lively impressions of the every-day life and workings in Augsburg. In contrast to the accounts books of other cities, the master builder’s ledgers have been well preserved over time and are nearly unscathed.

Within the frame of the DFG project led by Prof. Dr. Jörg Rogge (University of Mainz), manuscripts produced between 1320 and 1466 are being indexed and published successively as an online edition. The registries already contain more than 4.500 keywords allowing for an insight into the rich content of the source material. Via word-by-word links to online dictionaries, the edition furthers the work with and understanding of the Middle High German original text. The Trier Center for Digital Humanities (TCDH) has costumised the virtual research infrastructure FuD and the transcription tool Transcribo to digitally index the manuscripts.