Urkundenbuch des Zisterzienserklosters Altzelle, Erster Teil: 1162–1249 (review)

Tom Graber's edition of the diplomas of the Cistercian abbey of Altzelle from its founding through the first half of the thirteenth century is the twenty-fifth volume in the series, Codex Diplomaticus Saxoniae, now revived after a sixty-eight-year hiatus. It is a masterful and thorough exercise in medieval diplomatics and will serve the scholarly community well by making accessible an important fund of documents related to medieval Saxony and the Cistercian order. A compilation of all the documents of Altzelle will eventually comprise six volumes and around 1300 items, among which are one hundred papal charters and almost fifty royal ones.

Altzelle (Altzella) Abbey was the burial place of the noble Wettin family during the Middle Ages. Its earliest surviving charter (#1 in the edition) is a granting of land by Emperor Frederick I in 1162 at the request of Margrave Otto of Meißen to the monastic community that the latter had founded. The location was near Nossen (county of Meißen, between Dresden and Leipzig, in Sachsen), on the Mulde River. In 1175, the abbey became a daughter-house of the abbey of Pforta (Schulpforta, in the city of Bad Kösen, in Sachsen-Anhalt). The name of the abbey was Cella until the foundation of a daughter-house, Nova Cella (Neuzelle, in Brandenburg), in 1268, after which time the mother house became Vetus Cella. Altzelle became an important part of the regional economy and possessed three cities and seventy-five villages among its many holdings. It was home to Abbot Ludegar, a monastic author of the first half of the thirteenth century. In 1540 the abbey was secularized. The library went mostly to the University of Leipzig. All of this we have from the editor in the brief but informative historical introduction.

The present work admirably brings together more than a century and a half of scholarship. Already by 1855 Eduard Beyer had made a register of more than 900 documents related to Altzelle. Since that time scholars have culled documents from more than forty archives and libraries in and out of Germany. Graber includes three forgeries (nos. 85, 98, and 108). In this regard, he compares the abbey favorably to the motherhouse, Pforta, where there were seventeen forgeries during the same period of time.

A section of the introduction is devoted to nondiplomatic sources for the history of the abbey's founding. Graber gives twelve transcriptions from chronicles, annals, genealogies, tables, and inscriptions. His editions of these sources are his own,and he has included a detailed apparatus for each. Finally, the rules for the edition of documents are thoroughly presented.

The edition of 153 documents (numbered 1 to 108, 108A, and 109 to 152) fills 235 pages of a book of large proportions. Each document has an apparatus that includes a title, date, description, and footnotes. The title gives briefly the contents of the document. A diplomatic analysis under the heading "original" (save for papal and episcopal register entries) begins each description. Other headings used as needed identify manuscript copies, previous editions, entries in published registers, translations, and formularies (especially those of papal charters). Footnotes for textual and historical comments complete the individual apparatuses. It is hard to imagine fuller diplomatic descriptions. Sigillography is covered as is the basic codicology of the original charters. Paleography is omitted.

There are two bibliographies; the smaller one is dedicated to the history of the abbey and the larger one to general sources and literature. Both bibliographies are flawed by not separating primary and secondary sources. A set of seven appendices and a full index assist the reader in finding and understanding all of the elements of the documents.