Ad Fontes: new section of Mirator
Ad Fontes
Finnish scholars of the Middle Ages are in a relatively fortunate position. Unlike many other countries, almost all documents pertaining to the territory of modern Finland have been edited and made freely available for the use of researchers. The documents can be studied in digital format in the Diplomatarium Fennicum database (http://df.narc.fi/) maintained by the Finnish National Archives.
This outstanding situation is primarily thanks to Reinhold Hausen, the then director of the Finland’s State Archives. Between the end of the 19th century and the Second World War, Hausen took it upon himself to further the writing of Finnish history by publishing documents pertaining to Finland. The first item on Hausen’s list of publications was the so-called Black Book of Turku cathedral, the Registrum Ecclesiae Aboensis (REA). He published the documents contained in the REA in 1890. Hausen continued his work with medieval documents between 1910 and 1935 with his eight-volume series Finlands medeltidsurkunder (FMU). Taken together, these publications contain over 6 700 documents—the lion’s share of documents pertaining to Finland until the year 1530.
At the end of the twentieth century, with the increase in digital research resources, the documents in FMU were scanned and compiled into a database with the financial support of the Finnish Cultural Foundation. This database was named Diplomatarium Fennicum (DF). The database has enabled researches to use the documents in a digital format. By the 2010s the database had aged technically, and its use was found to be cumbersome. Therefore, a project was initiated to update the database with the support of the Kone Foundation. The result is the current Diplomatarium Fennicum database with its modern research tools. The basic structure still follows Hausen’s work, but some new documents that predate 1530 and were missing from Hausen’s edition have been added.
Despite all this, there is still content that needs to be added to the DF. Finnish medievalists continue to be aware of documents pertaining to medieval Finland and Finns which have never been published as editions and that should be made available to the community of scholars. Likewise, scholars have found gaps and errors in the DF material, which ought to be shared with the community of scholars through the DF database. To remedy these shortcomings, we have decided to open an Ad Fontes section in Mirator for the publication of medieval documents as part of scholarly articles.
The purpose of the section is that documents edited as part of articles will be transferred with the necessary metadata to the Diplomatarium Fennicum database, where they will be at the disposal of the scholarly community complete with the same information as for the other documents in the DF. The editorial board of the Diplomatarium Fennicum and the Finnish National Archives will be responsible for publishing the editions to be added to the database, and the publication will be in collaboration with the author of the article. The collaboration of Mirator and Diplomatarium Fennicum creates a new channel for the publishing of academically meritorious articles that contain document editions—a forum that has not existed in Finland before now.
What can be published in the Ad Fontes section? We welcome scholarly articles in Finnish, Swedish, or English that publish hitherto unknown or unpublished medieval documents pertaining to the history of the region of Finland or Finns, and corrections to published documents’ dating or contents. The Ad Fontes section can also include new, improved versions of documents already published by Hausen that follow the modern scholarly process for editions. If you are considering an edition, please contact the Mirator editorial board to discuss a schedule for publication. The completed article and the included edition should be sent to the editorial board through journal.fi (https://journal.fi/mirator). Articles will be peer reviewed.
Articles will follow Mirator’s customary writing guidelines. Further questions regarding guidelines for editing can be directed to the editorial board of the Diplomatarium Fennicum (df@arkisto.fi) to ensure that the editions and the necessary metadata are produced from the onset according to the requirements of the database. The editorial board of the Diplomatarium Fennicum is responsible for transferring the documents into the database, and the National Archives will publish them in conjunction with the biannual content-updates for the database. For further queries, please contact the Ad Fontes section’s editor, Kirsi Salonen (kilesa@utu.fi).
