Historical Basic Research in Romania and Digital Humanities

For distinct reasons, Romania has not yet been part of the international effort to exploit medieval curial sources, preserved either in the Vatican and Roman Archives, or in domestic collections. Nowadays, however, this view is beginning to change. An increased interest in these remarkable documentary texts has been encouraged and facilitated primarily by multiple initiatives that intend to bring papal or curial documents from regional repositories closer to researchers in the form of digital data. In a very short time, international, national, or institutional projects providing data bases and/or collections of digital images of medieval sources have become indispensable research tools. Transylvania, in particular, once a province of the Kingdom of Hungary and thus part of the medieval Latin world, benefits significantly from this wave of computer supported and controlled endeavours (both old and more recent). The intention of my presentation is to discuss how medieval studies from Transylvania (traditionally a multilingual and international research environment) employ this new technological compound, examine the limitations of each distinctive project, and finally consider possible steps for further expansion and improvement.