Abstract

For the Middle Ages, nowhere else in Europe is so much to be discovered about so many academic persons as in the regions of the Old Empire. This was the initial setting for the Repertorium Academicum Germanicum (RAG) with its central tool, a prosopographic database, containing biographical data of around 60,000 scholars of the Old Empire (1250-1550). The project follows the prosopography and the collective biography with a self-evident classification into the general history of the social, constitutional, scientific, knowledge, economic and cultural history of the Old Empire. The project is based on a excellent and unique source situation for the Old Empire. The relevant sources of the universities and faculties, including those of the German Nations in France and Italy, are preserved in unsurpassed quantity and quality. This allows extensive research into the academically educated scholars of the Old Empire - in respect to their personal history, their paths in life, their knowledge, their social impact and the specific culture that developed around them.