Chance of delivery
The chance of transmission is a technical term in historical science . This term means that certain documents and records, one can speak of sources in general, have a higher chance of surviving the times than others.
The historian Arnold Esch brought the term into the scientific discussion in 1985 as a distinction from the coincidence of tradition . He had dealt with the subject in his inaugural lecture at the University of Bern . The question of why certain documents are kept has a certain value for the historian. The examples treated by Esch range from antiquity to the 20th century, but his professional interests dictate that medieval examples predominate.
The historian usually deals with the question of the chance and chance of transmission in the context of a source criticism .
Chance of tradition in the Middle Ages
In the Middle Ages, the documents were kept in which the rights to real estate and the income from it were documented. Since they demonstrated rights to certain properties, these documents retained their value and were kept. Your chance of entering an archive and being preserved as a historical source was accordingly good.
In contrast, documents that documented short-term legal transactions were only kept for a short time. If they did not get into an archive as part of a legal dispute, their chances of being passed on were very low.
In addition, the chances of transmission depend on the degree of written form and the organizational forms of secular and spiritual administration. The files of public notaries , which have been preserved in Italian municipalities since the middle of the 12th century, offer a higher information density than the simultaneous sources in Germany. The same applies to the Domesday Book , the Pipe Rolls of the Exchequer or Baronum Catalogus .
Significantly more documents and documents have been preserved from the Middle Ages that report on goods, land, landowners and ownership claims than on the people who worked on the goods.
The accident of tradition
Sources can also have been preserved by chance. The chance of transmission does not offer any knowledge value for the historian, but can have a lasting effect on the type and quantity of the source material. Esch therefore expressly warns against unreflected statistical evaluations and ahistorical quantitative models.
See also
literature
- Arnold Esch : Tradition chance and tradition coincidence as a methodological problem of the historian , in: Historische Zeitschrift 240 (1985), pp. 529-570 Online MGH library ; also in: Ders .: The historian and the experience of bygone times. Munich 1994, pp. 39-69.