Resumen:From the perspective of Early Modern historical sciences, what was at stake when documentary evidence was examined through reproductions? What were their functions and limits within eighteenth-century expert opinions on the identification and authenticity of historical documents? How aware were eighteenth-century scholars of their mediality? In this paper, I explore these questions by examining four different engravings of the very same historical evidence. These were produced within the context of a dispute about the identification of a gravestone discovered in 1770. This dispute was arbitrated by the director of the Royal Institute of Historical Sciences at the University of Göttingen, Johann Christoph Gatterer (1727–1799). Here, I argue that when historical documents were examined through reproductions, the artifacts of greatest evidentiary value are not what they visualized but, instead, the artifacts through which historical information was classified, displayed, and conveyed.

«(...) hovering in the clouds, Divine Providence raises a long curtain and reveals behind it the Temple of Peace, as it was formerly built in Rome. At the doors of the Temple, Justice and Peace kiss and embrace each other (...)»2.

Verbal descriptions, such as the one quoted above, were intended to mediate and supplement the message conveyed through images in the Early Modern period. In this particular case, in which the union of Justice and Peace is celebrated, Johann Gottfried von Meiern (1692–1745) describes the iconographic elements from an engraved scene in words. The engraving was used as the frontispiece to a collection of legal documents that he edited at the beginning of the eighteenth century (Figure 1).

The work, entitled Acta Pacis Westphalicae Publica, was printed in six volumes between 1734 and 1736 and is still considered an essential edition of records and documents related to the Peace of Westphalia3. However, despite the significant amount of text displayed in more than 5,000 pages, the volumes did not contain all the preserved minutes of the meetings held in the cities of Münster and Osnabrück. Furthermore, they were not free of printing errors4.

Dealing with patchy records and recognizing errors introduced in handwritten documents and their reproductions was part of the daily work of Meiern, who, from 1729, had been in charge of the archive of the Electorate of Brunswick-Lüneburg. In this role, Meiern issued many expert opinions on handwritten deeds of great legal significance within the German territories5. The most recurrent goals of these expert opinions were to acknowledge the authenticity of manuscripts, identify their issuers, and end public disputes.

A few years before publishing the first volume of his Acta Pacis Westphalicae Publica, Meiern was called upon to arbitrate such a dispute. In 1731, it concerned the granting of tax privileges to the cathedral chapter of Hildesheim. At issue was not the authenticity of the legal document by which the privilege was signed but rather the correct identification of its issuer so that its date – and, consequently, the legal effect of its terms – could be precisely specified. To facilitate his work, Meiern requested access to the original document. If this were not possible, he would be equally satisfied if local skilled hands produced a faithful copy6. In Hildesheim, this was the solution that was settled on. Meiern then received an engraving on which the original manuscript was reproduced. In this way, the images that passed through his hands in the 1730s responded to the demands imposed by working with historical and legally binding documents not only from an iconographic point of view but also from a diplomatic one.

In 1720, controversies over the authenticity and identification of legally binding documents – or diplomata – were already known in the German territories as diplomatic wars – or bella diplomatica7. The Latin expression echoes the title of Jean Mabillon’s (1632–1707) De re diplomatica (1681). In this work, Mabillon drew up rules for analyzing the textual formulas frequently used in written documents, including, for example, the shape of handmade letters8. When taken to the press, Mabillon’s textual arguments were followed by several plates engraved by Pierre Giffart (1643–1723), who had the task of reproducing on metal the textual formulas and graphic features of extant medieval charters produced in different media. When reproducing information, it is unlikely that Giffart saw all of the original documents he engraved. It is rather more likely that the plates were mainly produced after drawings of the diplomata made by different hands, including Mabillon’s9. Nevertheless, in the particular dispute for which the expert opinion of Johann Gottfried von Meiern was required, the provost in Hildesheim granted access to the original document to the artist Johann Ludwig Brandes. He was already known for having produced in the 1720s a series of engravings under the title Gloriosa Antiquitas Hildesina10, which displayed selected pieces of the Cathedral Treasure. A decade later, he was the artist engaged to accurately reproduce on metal the written artifact for which his eyes were testimony and about which the archivist of the Electorate of Brunswick-Lüneburg should give his expert opinion (Figure 2).

From the perspective of Early Modern diplomatics, what was at stake when diplomata were examined through reproductions? What were their functions and limits within eighteenth-century expert opinions on the identification and authenticity of historical documents? How aware were scholars of the mechanisms of reproduction and transmission of documentary evidence, as well as of its mediality? In this paper, I explore these questions by examining different reproductions of the very same historical evidence produced within the context of a second, though comparable, eighteenth-century dispute, since it was equally arbitrated at a distance and with the help of an expert opinion based on the rules of diplomatics. The new controversy took place in Quedlinburg in the year 1770 around the identification of a recently discovered gravestone, which was first identified as that of Henry the Fowler’s (c.876–936), founder of the Ottonian dynasty of Saxon kings. However, this was subsequently challenged in the press. To settle this dispute, the director of the Royal Institute of Historical Sciences at the University of Göttingen, Johann Christoph Gatterer (1727–1799), intervened.

Soon after Meiern settled the dispute in Hildesheim, a new university was founded in the German territories historically connected to the Electorate of Brunswick-Lüneburg. In the late 1760s, the University of Göttingen became an important center for the production of historical knowledge11; this was also the institutional context in which Gatterer founded the Royal Institute of Historical Sciences12. Its purpose was to promote the study and the practice of the so-called auxiliary historical sciences, including diplomatics. With this purpose in mind, Gatterer took part at the regular meetings of the institute and was also engaged in making a larger audience acquainted with the scholarly interests of its members. He, therefore, edited a journal that, though mainly devoted to publishing reviews of recent books, also included contributions by the institute members on many classes of historical documents, such as maps, coins, medals, coats of arms13, and diplomata14.

The fifteenth volume of the Allgemeine historische Bibliothek opens with Gatterer’s expert opinion – a diplomatisches Gutachten– on the historical evidence found in Quedlinburg, which had triggered a controversy in January 1770. Considering the importance of Gatterer’s approach from the perspective of the history of historiography, it is unsurprising that his expert opinion has already been explored in a few recent studies. In a paper published in 2015, Kasper Risbjerg Eskildsen convincingly shows how Gatterer’s rigorous analysis of the documental evidence related to the 1770 dispute helped to «shape the modern ideal of the historian as an archival researcher»15. When conducting his research on diplomatics, however, the professor in Göttingen had an eye for theoretical and practical issues, as argued by Maciej Dorna16. This was explained by the roles played by diplomata in the Early Modern period: they were simultaneously «testimony of law and history»17. How Gatterer integrated practical diplomatics within the framework of eighteenth-century historiography has been analyzed in detail by Martin Gierl18. Nevertheless, in all these studies, the graphic features of the textual information and the functions occupied by the images in Gatterer’s courses and textbooks on diplomatics, in general, and around the 1770 contention, in particular, have not been sufficiently explored. In this paper, I investigate the reproduction and frequently thereby transmediation of documentary evidence for eighteenth-century historical research. The term transmediation is here used to stress both the mediality of historical records and how they were often reproduced «into a new medium», as formulated by Randolph C. Head19. To achieve my goals, I analyze four metal engravings from the gravestone discovered in Quedlinburg and printed in 1770, 1783, 1787, and 1799 from different perspectives, including the graphical, material, and editorial.

In the first section of this article, I present the terms of the controversy on the identification of the gravestone discovered in Quedlinburg and for which Gatterer’s expert opinion was required. Considering that the professor in Göttingen would have been aware that diplomata and other classes of historical documents have particular features that reproductions hardly convey, I explore, on the one hand, to what extent the use of drawings and prints could set limits to the task he was expected to fulfill. Yet, since one of the drawings Gatterer received was engraved to circulate together with his expert opinion, I analyze, on the other hand, the functions that can be attributed to the images of this artifact. Following this, I take the second step of examining hitherto unknown details of the gravestone revealed in 1787 and once more reproduced with the help of the printing press. This new engraving figures in Gottfried Christian Voigt’s three-volume History of the Quedlinburg Abbey. After exploring its visual elements, I show that the plate inserted in Voigt’s work has the effect of highlighting the mechanisms of reproduction of documentary evidence for eighteenth-century historical research. In a third and last step, I follow the path left by the artistic hands in charge of producing two different replicas of the plate originally engraved in 1770 after the drawings of the gravestone. These two replicas were produced in 1783 and 1799 to illustrate Gregor Maximilian Gruber’s and Gatterer’s handbooks on diplomatics, respectively. Here, I argue that when historical documents were examined through reproductions, the artifacts of greatest evidentiary value are not what they visualized but, instead, the artifacts through which historical information was classified, displayed, and conveyed.

In 1756, the Abbess of Quedlinburg, Anna Amalia (1723–1787), sister of the Prussian King Frederick II the Great (1712–1786), promoted the search for the gravestone of Henry the Fowler20. Her particular interests in the figure of the medieval king seemed not to be connected to the ongoing rivalries between Austria and Prussia on the control of territories within the Holy Roman Empire. Rather, her duties as Abbess of Quedlinburg explain more cogently such an archeological enterprise.

According to a local tradition, Henry the Fowler was buried in Quedlinburg after his death, making the Abbey a center of memory of the Ottonian dynasty21. Whether the king himself was directly involved in the foundation of this religious institution together with his wife, Matilda, is still a matter of controversy22. It is, however, certain that the expedition promoted by Anna Amalia could only find the remains of a wooden artifact in the spot where the king’s body was expected to be. By contrast, the bones corresponding to two human bodies were found in the grave of his widow. The finding laid ground to the hypothesis according to which Henry the Fowler and Queen Matilda were first buried next to each other, and then, at a later point in time, the king’s body was removed and placed together with his wife in her grave23.

At least since the beginning of the eighteenth century, the audience interested in the history of Quedlinburg was visually presented with the idea that the two bodies were initially buried side by side. Friedrich Ernst Kettner (1671–1722) was well aware of the pitfalls when writing a historical work on a subject for which just a few pieces of evidence were extant. In the preface to his book on the history of the Quedlinburg Abbey published in 1710, Kettner apologizes to his readership for possible inaccuracies that might have flowed from his quill24. One of those noticeable inaccuracies was identifying a so-called memorial stone (Leichenstein) disposed close to the memorial stone of Henry the Fowler, as Matilda’s, though not his widow and Queen, but rather the first Abbess of Quedlinburg, who shared the same name (Figure 3)25.

At the center of the image, two volumes representing the stones are displayed in perspective close to each other, yet without providing any further visual information through which they could be identified. This function can be exclusively attributed to the inaccurate textual description of the monument located in the upper portion of the page. In contrast, the geometrical composition of the woodcut plays a distinct role: it ornaments the printed volume without conveying any particular historical evidence. Indeed, this evidence was claimed to have been discovered just over half a century later.

In 1769, Georg Christoph Hallensleben (1723–1794) assumed the office of the high priest at the Market Church of St. Benedikti in Quedlinburg26. Around the beginning of the following year, strong weather conditions made then visible the engraved content of a stone used in the construction of a local building. After examining it with greater attention, driven by his antiquarian interests27, Hallensleben was confident in having found the gravestone of Henry the Fowler. It did not take much time until the discovery of extraordinary historical evidence from the Ottonian period was reported in the press. On January 27th, 1770, the periodical Hamburgischer Correspondenten informed its readership about the archeological find which would shed light on history28. But shortly afterward, an anonymous letter published in Halle challenged the arguments presented by Hallensleben, triggering a public controversy on the identification of the gravestone. At that point, an expert opinion was required.

For the past ten years, Johann Christoph Gatterer’s teaching and research activities contributed to making the University of Göttingen into a well-recognized center for studying the historical sciences. His reputation was by then significant enough to warrant a qualified opinion about the arguments in dispute. But since the professor of history and director of the Royal Institute of Historical Sciences in Göttingen could not see the gravestone discovered in Quedlinburg with his own eyes, he had to examine the artifact through reproductions. What, therefore, Gatterer had in his hands was nothing more than two drawings and a detailed verbal description of the gravestone, at least the latest one by Hallensleben himself29. The high priest at St. Benedikti assured him that the drawings were made with great «mathematical accuracy»30 and that the lines transmediated onto paper were congruent to those engraved on the stone31.

As far as I know, the handmade drawings are no longer preserved. Nevertheless, carefully reproducing on paper what the eyes could see was a recurrent antiquarian research practice in the eighteenth century. “It was through images that antiquarians exchanged information about the objects of their study”, as argued by Giovanna Ceserani.32 It is therefore not surprising that, at the same time that Hallensleben was attending to the material remains of the German medieval past, several techniques were widespread within antiquarian circles through which inscriptions on stone or metal could be reproduced. Rubbings of coins produced with graphite – sometimes covered with ink – and epigraphic squeezes were part of several collections of antiquities in the period33. These techniques conveyed proximity to the original artifacts they reproduced and hence provided evidentiary authority. Yet what Hallensleben sent to Göttingen were neither squeezes nor rubbings but rather drawings. Gatterer had no other alternative than to rely upon them when analyzing the artifact, such as Meiern relied upon the engraving he received almost forty years before.

First, Gatterer examined the inscriptions according to the classificatory system of alphabetic characters he had been developing since the previous decade.34 Considering the content and the style of the letters of the engraved text, he dated the gravestone to a time at least three centuries after Henry the Fowler’s death. By doing so, Gatterer took the opportunity to showcase the effectiveness of his paleographical approach, which he called Linnaeismus graphicus,35 to a large audience. In a second step, he analyzed the figurative elements displayed at the center of the stone. The coat of arms corroborates, in heraldic language, what the inscriptions also announce: «Here lies the Knight von Hoyem»36, and therefore not a King, as previously claimed by Hallensleben.

Before sending his expert opinion to the printing shop, Gatterer discussed the case on April 14th, 1770, with the Royal Institute of Historical Sciences members. This regular meeting was also attended by Anton Ulrich von Erath (1709–1773), the archivist in Quedlinburg whom Anna Amalia asked to fill in some of the documentary gaps and correct the errors introduced in Friedrich Ernst Kettner’s history of the Abbey. Under the abbess’ request, Erath compiled hundreds of diplomata that made up his Codex Diplomaticus Quedlinburgensis, published in 176437. This collection of documents gained prestige among eighteenth-century scholars. It is for this reason that Gatterer likely had no doubt that the seals and coats of arms of the Hoyem noble family reproduced in Erath’s Codex provided an authoritative reference for analyzing the visual information engraved on the stone and sent to Göttingen as drawings38. Gatterer became familiar with this research procedure during his academic and personal acquaintance with Johann Heumann (1711–1760), professor of jurisprudence at the University of Altdorf, in whose house he lived for three years39. The vast collection of original seals that Heumann had compiled was used in his courses to settle legal disputes over the authenticity of written documents40. However, when the original documents were not available, he also drew on reproductions of seals, coats of arms, and diplomata41. This same practice of consulting reproductions of documentary evidence, made with various techniques, was likewise carried on in Göttingen.

Particularly in his courses on diplomatics, Gatterer used both originals and reproductions of diplomata and other sorts of ancient inscriptions42. The historical pieces of evidence that he collected throughout the years for research and teaching purposes consisted of hundreds of original medieval manuscripts and seals along with thousands of prints and drawings43. As a matter of fact, the diversity of techniques by which historical information was recorded on paper or parchment in this collection was part of a didactic strategy. When his students were unfamiliar with the graphic and material configuration of diplomata, the university professor used drawings and prints. Only at a later point in time would he deal with issues concerning the analysis of historical sources that could not be easily grasped from just looking at reproductions44.

For the case of the expert opinion requested in 1770, the information conveyed in stone was first drawn on paper, as we already know. For at least material and paleographical reasons, it is improbable that the two drawings had any area rubbed off from the artifact itself. First, the stone measured more than 2 meters long by about 75 centimeters wide45. Any rubbed copy of the whole gravestone – or even just of the inscriptions – would have required the author of the drawings in Quedlinburg to either glue together different sheets of paper or provide the sequence of the parts, which would undoubtedly have been described in the expert opinion. Second – and differently than how it would have occurred in rubbings and squeezes –, the hands involved in drawing the artifact and reproducing the inscription introduced an error that did not go unnoticed by Gatterer’s attentive eyes. When comparing the shape of the letter «E» in the same occurrence reproduced both in the verbal description

of the gravestone and in the drawing, Gatterer could easily spot historical inconsistencies in the shape of the letters reproduced on paper. But after highlighting this possible error from a paleographical point of view, Gatterer considered it irrelevant for his purposes46. For what was at stake in 1770, he had enough information to overcome the inconsistencies in the material he received from Quedlinburg and, hence, identify the gravestone and end the controversy publicized in the press. In doing so, Gatterer proved Hallensleben’s claims to be wrong.

Following a request from the members of the institute, Gatterer published his expert opinion in the pages of the periodical Allgemeine historische Bibliothek and requested that his text be accompanied not only by the verbal description of the gravestone made by Hallensleben but also by a reproduction of its drawing (Figure 4).

In the same way that the drawing provided enough evidence for the professor in Göttingen to identify the artifact, the engraving would enable a broad audience to closely follow Gatterer’s diplomatic arguments and accordingly testify to their authority. Since no more evidence seemed to have been overlooked, the controversy about the artifact discovered by the high priest at the Market Church of St. Benedikti ended in 1770. In the following decade, however, hitherto unknown details of the very same material evidence of the German medieval past were brought to light and once more reproduced to a large audience with the help of the printing press.

Although Anton Ulrich von Erath published a significant amount of documentary evidence in his authoritative Codex diplomaticus Quedlinburgens is in 1764, several diplomata related to the history of the Quedlinburg Abbey remained unexplored by enlightened minds at the time and unpublished by the printing presses. By the early 1780s, these gaps became evident both from a documentary point of view and from the historiographical perspective through which the subject had been treated up until then.

In the introduction to a series of essays mainly on the history of Quedlinburg, Gottfried Christian Voigt (1740–1791) reminds his readership that Friedrich Ernst Kettner’s 1710 book had many inaccuracies. Furthermore, it only dealt with church historical matters. A more comprehensive historical work is still missing, argued Voigt47. By this point, he was well acquainted with the archival sources in Quedlinburg, not only through Erath’s Codex but also as a result of his ongoing administrative tasks on the role of the local syndic, as well as his early historical interest in charges of witchcraft48, which led to his public advocacy against the use of torture in trials49. By 1782, Voigt was knowledgeable about the material preserved in the abbey archive, which suffered irreplaceable losses throughout the centuries, mainly due to fire and looting50. The intensity of the research he had been undertaking was reflected in the breath of his new editorial project. Between 1786 and 1791, Voigt published a three-volume History of the Quedlinburg Abbey and dedicated it to Anna Amalia. Apart from delivering a more comprehensive narrative on the subject, he also provided his readership with an extensive set of archival sources, which were included in the critical apparatus of the work51 to meet eighteenth-century scholars’ methodological expectations52. In this sense, documentary evidence served to provide the work with authority. Nevertheless, if attentive and erudite readers should find errors in the text, the author asked to be immediately informed about them so that they could be corrected for53.

The kinds of documentary gaps and orders of errors in printed volumes in the Early Modern period were various in nature. Meiern, for example, knew that the Acta Pacis Westphalicae Publica did not present all extant minutes of the negotiations that resulted in the peace treaty of 1648, just as Kettner apologized to readers on account of possible gaps and historical inaccuracies in his writings. Apologies were not only a recurring topos of an Enlightenment rhetoric of modesty, one which was often employed to convey the scholars’ awareness of the growing knowledge about various epochs and parts of the world. Indeed, many inaccuracies also stemmed from the transmediation of information and its dissemination by the work of the press. In the second volume of his History of the Abbey, Voigt presents previously unpublished transcriptions of documents54, either taken from originals or archival copies55, and takes up the controversy surrounding the identification of the gravestone found by Hallensleben in 1770. The discovery was already briefly mentioned in his earlier writings56. However, despite the misattribution of the artifact found by the high priest at St. Benedikti, Voigt insisted that it brought new information about the local medieval past. To convince his readers of his claim, Voigt even promised to reveal further details about the case and publish a visual representation «more faithful» to the material reality of the gravestone found, «at least as far as the inscriptions are concerned»57. The promise is fulfilled in the second volume.

The conditions for presenting a visual representation more faithful to the material reality of the artifact derive from the actions undertaken by Voigt to overcome the difficulty of reading the inscription located on its upper part. After observing the stone «very carefully», together with the help of friends who were «very experienced in the study of written documents», Voigt decided to clean it with water and a brush carefully58. Having removed the sand, the form of the inscriptions became more apparent so as to reveal more details of the epigraphic information, which could then be reproduced in a newly engraved plate (Figure 5).

The information engraved on the stone is reproduced and disseminated in another medium, a metal engraving that shows no indication of authorship. It is possible, however, that it was transmediated by Gottfried Christian Voigt’s brother. What is certain is that the final graphic result of the composition of the plate presents similarities and differences concerning the engraving that had been published alongside Gatterer’s expert opinion.

Both engravings printed in 1770 and 1787 show hatched areas in the upper and lower portions of the image. Within antiquarian and artistic circles, the use of hatching was well-known for representing the absence of epigraphic information, either due to material loss of the original artifacts or difficulties in observing the documentary evidence. However, in the new engraving, one should notice that different letters are revealed outside of the hatched areas located both in the upper line and in the lower-left corner of the inscription arranged around the knight. Moreover, it includes new elements in and above the central shield, has larger dimensions, and is equally distinct from the first image of the stone in terms of style. Further differences emerge when comparing how the human figure and the animal are depicted and how the artist decided to mark the material limits of the artifact.

Whereas frames and lines are frequently employed as arbitrary graphic elements in the composition of texts and the reproductions of archaeological evidence in the Early Modern period, the plate’s central motif presents the core visual information that should precede Voigt’s narrative. In the author’s words: «First of all, [as promised,] I put the more detailed drawing of the gravestone in front of my readers so that they will be able to judge for themselves on this matter»59. In the practice of reading, however, it is the guidance of Voigt’s words that actually precedes the readers’ visual contact with the transmediated artifact.

In cases where volumes were to be accompanied by engravings printed separately on an intaglio press, the images were subsequently added by the bookbinder, frequently between the gatherings or at the end of the book. This is why the engravers often indicated on the metal plate the position in the work where the plate should be inserted, as can be seen in the upper right-hand corner of Figure 5. In this instance, it is indicated that the engraving should be inserted after page 96, i.e., six pages after Voigt argues that his readers should see the more detailed reproduction of the gravestone to judge for themselves. As Voigt certainly knew how the products of the printing and the intaglio presses were assembled in the hand-press period, he might already have figured out that the precedence of the image was more a logical than a material matter. This is explained by the fact that where a plate would be inserted depended on how the text was distributed in leaves and gatherings. In this sense, the insertion of the image after page 96 is justified because it closes both the gathering identified by the signature «F» and Voigt’s arguments about the discovery of a gravestone by Hallensleben. Yet, since the plates were inserted between the gatherings by hand, they could feature in unexpected positions or even in the wrong volume60. The (mis)assemblage of products of different presses frequently called the attention of the readership to the mediality of printed artifacts61. Nevertheless, regardless of position, the details revealed in the image engraved for Voigt’s work open a window to further investigate what was at stake when documentary evidence was reproduced for and transmitted in eighteenth-century historical works.

Besides representing the gravestone, the plate inserted within Voigt’s work includes, at his request, seven coats of arms engraved around the central motif62. Thus, readers could easily compare the similarities between the visual information present in the stone found by Hallensleben and the heraldic language of the shields associated with the Hoym noble family, as identified by Gatterer. These coats of arms, in turn, were not composed by the engraver in the face of any extant material evidence. Instead, the artist used as a reference the series of coats of arms and seals already printed in the Codex Diplomaticus Quedlinburgensis compiled by Erath and regarded by Gatterer in 1770 as an authoritative work. The textual information engraved below each coat of arms indicates the number of the plate and the corresponding particular image in the Codex(Figure 6).

The differences between the shapes of the coats of arms published in the Codex and those presented in Voigt’s book indicate that the second engraving is not a replica of the previous ones. Instead, the new image sought to remain more faithful to the language of heraldry than to deliver a formally identical composition of the visual material engraved for an authoritative work, in which several plates displayed a collection of juxtaposed coats of arms, medals, and seals. These plates provided a catalog of visual references through which material remains of Quedlinburg’s medieval past could be identified.

In the Early Modern period, heraldry had a strongly coded visual language so that the engraved coats of arms in Erath’s and Voigt’s plates represent their elements rather than a particular artifact. Thus, to identify the knight depicted at the center of the gravestone, Voigt followed Gatterer’s method and took as a reference the coat of arms number 10 displayed at the plate XXXIII of Erath’s work. After comparing, first, the coat of arms available in the Codex with the newly revealed elements of the gravestone reproduced in the 1787 engraving and, second, the style of the inscriptions, Voigt came to no different conclusion than Gatterer did. The gravestone is attributed to Friedrich von Hoym the Elder, whose probable death dates back to 129963. «Mr. Gatterer’s opinion which I presented in the first volume (...) is therefore very well-founded, and his judgment – as far as he could deduce from the imperfect and incomplete drawing – was adequate», concludes Voigt64.

Strictly speaking, the drawings of the gravestone sent to Göttingen were unknown to Voigt. What he saw and judged as imperfect was the engraved image – made after one of the drawings – which circulated together with Gatterer’s expert opinion on the controversy triggered in 1770. From this perspective, the drawings and the engraving were regarded as unfaithful to the material reality of the artifact they represented. Therefore, Voigt commissioned a new engraving two decades later to showcase, first, the extraordinary archeological discovery made by Hallensleben (even though it was not the gravestone of the founder of the Ottonian dynasty of Saxon kings) – and, second, his own effort to reveal previously unknown details of the artifact. By confronting information recorded in different years, in distinct media, and by various techniques – namely, stone, paper, drawing, and engraving – I would conclude that Voigt’s plate has the effect of highlighting the mechanisms of reproduction and transmission of documentary evidence for eighteenth-century historical research. In this sense, the most significant documentary evidence for my purposes are the eighteenth-century engravings and books themselves as artifacts.

A few days before Gatterer read and discussed his expert opinion on the gravestone discovered in Quedlinburg at the Royal Institute of Historical Sciences, the courses he would offer at the University of Göttingen during the summer semester of 1770 were announced in the periodical press. Through public announcements of this kind, several German universities tried to attract new students who were interested in following the lectures of professors, especially those recognized by the scholarly community65. Such was the case with Gatterer.

By the end of the previous decade, the University of Göttingen had become a respected center for studying historical issues, and it is in this context that Gatterer’s scholarly work stood out. His regular teaching activities – such as those announced in the Göttingische Anzeigen von Gelehrten Sachen on March 26th, 1770 – confirm the growing importance of the institutional environment from which judgments on the authenticity and identification of historical documents were proclaimed in the German territories in the last decades of the century. In the summer semester of 1770, Gatterer sought to familiarize his students with the study of diplomatics during the mornings, whereas those interested in universal history could follow his lectures in the afternoons66. Indeed, from a historiographical perspective, the courses on diplomatics he offered until the end of his life67 played a central role in establishing the auxiliary sciences of History as part of university studies68. These courses, in turn, were based on his handbooks.

At the end of 1797, the local presses in Göttingen were busy producing a small upright-shaped book, in-octavo, but whose gatherings were intended to circulate accompanied by twelve metal engraved plates printed on larger-sized paper. The dimensions of these plates – folded more than once and often inserted at the end of the volume – provide clues both to their function and origin.

In the preface to this handbook entitled Abriss der Diplomatik and published in 1798, Gatterer expresses his intention of presenting to a wide readership a more general structure of diplomatics as an auxiliary science of history, since he considered his earlier handbook unfinished69. The book referred to was his Elementa Artis Diplomaticae Universalis70, a title published in-quarto in 1765 and on which his regular courses at the University of Göttingen in 1770 were based. At the time Gatterer published his expert opinion on the gravestone discovered by Hallesleben, his Elementa Artis Diplomaticae Universalis was praised as «infinitely superior in plan and execution to the work on the same subject, published by the Benedictines in France»71.

Regardless of how different the German and the French titles were in their plan, both were illustrated. The plates engraved for Gatterer’s Elementa present collections of alphabets, monograms, and other graphic features through which one could identify ancient diplomata and inquire about their authenticity. For these purposes, the engravings seemed to fulfill their function over three decades later perfectly. As Gatterer finished a more comprehensive version of his systematical studies on diplomatics, he sent the German manuscript to the same publishing house where his previous handbook on the subject was printed in-quarto format. Therefore, it is not surprising that the plates that circulated in 1798 within the pages of Gatterer’s Abriss der Diplomatik are a reprint of those engraved in 1765 for his Elementa Artis Diplomaticae Universalis. The engraved matrices were carefully kept and sent on different occasions to the intaglio press, as evidenced by the use of distinct paper stocks for each impression72.

As it was frequently the case of collections alphabets, monograms, medals, and seals displayed on paper, the plates originally printed in 1765 juxtapose visual elements of medieval diplomata in a classificatory manner. These were engraved either after empirical observation of original material or after reproductions previously published in authoritative works, including titles on the same subject published by the Benedictines in France. In this sense, all the plates in Gatterer’s 1765 and 1798 handbooks on diplomatics systematically present visual clues rather than entirely represent particular diplomata.

When reflecting on the structure of his handbooks on diplomatics at a mature age, Gatterer felt the need to deliver not only a general system but also to acquaint his readership with methodological issues involved in the analysis of particular cases. In 1799, he, therefore, published a supplementary volume to the previous year’s text, now entitled Praktische Diplomatik. For this title, Gatterer commissioned large-format engravings of some particular diplomata instead of visual clues of paradigmatic ones. In this work, his expert opinion on the gravestone discovered in 1770 was published for a second time, along with a corresponding engraving73. At first glance, it seems to be a reprint made from the same engraved matrix, a practice already adopted by the publishing house in the volume printed the previous year. After closer examination, however, some differences between the plates come to the foreground.

Regardless of the lines around the central motif included in the Allgemeine historische Bibliothek and the information left by the engravers to the bookbinder in 1770 and 1799, the plate is intended to circulate in Gatterer’s Praktische Diplomatikas unchanged. Although the dimensions of the gravestone represented on paper are identical in both works, minor differences emerge when looking mainly at the hatched areas (Figure 7).

These minor differences are evidence of the remarkable accuracy with which unknown hands in 1799 produced a replica of the plate, one originally engraved after the drawings of the gravestone discovered in 1770. Since they aimed to allow the readership to closely follow Gatterer’s diplomatic arguments and testify to their authority, there should be no distinction between both engravings. Within the editorial and scholarly context of the handbook published in 1799, the image had an even more straightforward didactic function: it served more to illustrate a method than to represent the current state of a medieval artifact.

It is highly possible that Gatterer was unaware of the measures undertaken by Voigt in the 1780s to overcome the difficulties in reading the inscriptions engraved on the stone. Voigt’s three-volume History of the Quedlinburg Abbey is not listed in Gatterer’s private collection of books that went up for auction after his death74. Although the University Library in Göttingen promptly acquired a copy of them, it is not certain that the new volumes caught his attention75. Certain is, however, that the new details of the gravestone revealed in 1787 would not modify the conclusions presented by the director of the Royal Institute of Historical Sciences in 1770, for which the engraving replicated in 1799 still fulfilled its function. As a matter of fact, this was not the first time the original engraving was replicated to meet the didactic purposes of the work in which it was then inserted.

Three years before the first volume of Voigt’s History of the Quedlinburg Abbey was available on the German book market, Gregor Maximilian Gruber (1739–1799) published in Vienna a three-volume handbook on diplomatics. Whereas the first volume focused on theoretical issues, the second adopted a more practical approach: Gruber delved into the work in the archives and included some studies on particular documents analyzed according to the rules of diplomatics, such as Gatterer’s expert opinion on the gravestone discovered in Quedlinburg. He claims to have chosen this particular case for one could «safely rely on the thoroughly systematic Gatterer», who he considered to be an insuperable authority in the field. Moreover, Gatterer analyzed the artifact according to his Elementa Artis Diplomaticae Universalis, the handbook upon which Gruber heavily relied76.

Indeed, the first volume printed in Vienna featured some of the visual clues already engraved for Gatterer’s work in 1765. But since the author had not yet released a book on practical diplomatics almost two decades later, Gruber decided to tackle the task77. Along with the selected cases described in the second volume – once more promptly available at University Library in Göttingen78 –, Gruber included an engraved plate, on which excerpts of medieval diplomata were displayed around a new reproduction of the gravestone. And as it was the case of Gatterer’s Praktische Diplomatik in 1799, the image engraved for the first time in 1770 was replicated for didactic purposes in Gruber’s handbook. However, the artist commissioned in 1783 forgot to replicate a letter in the center of the upper inscription, introducing an error in the visual record (Figure 8). Errors of this kind could compromise the accuracy of printed arguments. It is for this reason that the reproduction of documentary evidence required skilled hands and trained eyes.

When Gatterer sent the manuscript of the Praktische Diplomatik to the publisher, he did not hesitate to have the plate engraved in 1770 replicated. By contrast, he did express reservations about the text. Already in 1770, he was well aware that things could go wrong in the printing shop. On October 6th, he requested that his publisher employ «a very experienced and attentive corrector»79 in order to avoid printing errors in the fifteenth issue of the Allgemeine historische Bibliothek. The tortuous handwriting in parts of the submitted material justified his concern.

In the hand-press period, authors and publishers relied on the intense work of the correctors, who were in charge of establishing accurate texts80. However, the compositor’s lack of paleographical knowledge and the absence of precise metal types for printing all of the ancient letters included in the manuscript of Gatterer’s expert opinion led to the introduction of graphical errors. These errors were of an unusual nature since only the trained eyes of someone with an intimate knowledge of the way the shape of letters had changed over time would have had the ability to correct them. In the text published in 1770, the compositor used the symbols for illustrating different phases of the moon to represent the neo-Gothic letters C and D. Furthermore, he set up a letter of the Hebrew alphabet in the place where the neo-Gothic letter N should have been inserted (Figure 9). The geographical distance between Johann Justinus Gebauer’s (1710–1772) printing shop in Halle, Saxony, and Göttingen made it difficult to correct the proofs quickly, and so the text circulated with errors.

By the end of the eighteenth century, Gatterer’s analysis of the gravestone was not only suitable to be included in his new handbook on practical diplomatics, that is to say, in his work on how diplomatas hould be understood, judged, and used81. It was also an opportunity to correct «some major printing errors», in particular the shape of the «neo-Gothic letters, on which dating depended mainly» and which were «completely deformed», in Gatterer’s words82. Yet the errors introduced when reproducing documentary evidence were neither an exclusive product of the intaglio nor the printing presses.

As I have argued, paleographical inconsistencies came to the fore when Gatterer compared the drawings of the gravestone on the one side with the reproduction of its inscriptions on the other. What called attention to his attentive eyes was the form of the letter «E» on a particular spot of the artifact discovered in Quedlinburg, a shape that was not consistent within the transmediated records sent to Göttingen. But whereas Gatterer could overcome this inconsistency when analyzing the case in 1770, the compositor of his handwritten expert opinion at the printing shop in Halle could not put his paleographical argument on paper. Indeed, the readers of the Allgemeine historische Bibliothek could not see the differences spotted out by Gatterer since the same metal type was used to represent two distinct forms of the letter «E» (Figure 9). His arguments could no longer be followed by the readers’ eyes. Hence, when this text went once more to the press, it was clear to Gatterer what his local publisher needed to do. In the light of diplomatics, different metal types had to be used.

At the end of the eighteenth century, the printing house in charge of publishing Gatterer’s handbooks Abrissder Diplomatik (1798) and Praktische Diplomatik (1799) could follow the author’s instructions from Göttingen. The distinct forms of the letter «E» were corrected in his expert opinion (Figure 9). Additionally, new typefaces were used in all gatherings of both titles. Three decades earlier, the text circulated in the fifteenth issue of the Allgemeine historische Bibliothek in Gothic, also known as German letters. To this point in time, the publisher in Halle had followed a trend developed by several printing shops in the Early Modern period, one advised in many contemporary printers’ manuals, such as Johann Heinrich Gottfried Ernesti’s83. In contrast, texts linked to the Latin textual tradition were frequently printed with Roman, or more straightforwardly Latin letters.

When preparing the manuscripts of his two last handbooks on diplomatics to the press, Gatterer did not hesitate to demand that both volumes be printed with Latin letters rather than German ones. In a preface dated October 20th, 1797, he substantiated his choice with diplomatic arguments. The letters called German «are corrupted Latin letters», in Gatterer’s words. Therefore, he did not see himself in a position to choose between German and Latin letters, but rather «between genuine Latin letters and those miserably artificial ones»84.

Such a conscious typographical choice is a testimony to Gatterer’s awareness of the mechanisms of reproduction and transmission of information in and across different media. I argue that this awareness is also required when analyzing Early Modern written artifacts, including any additional graphical material that might have accompanied them. By examining this eighteenth-century debate on the identification and authenticity of a gravestone, I hope to have shown that when historical documents were examined through reproductions, the artifacts of greatest evidentiary value are not what they visualized but, instead, the artifacts through which historical information was classified, displayed, and conveyed.