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The Institute Wolfenbütteler Institut für Numismatik, Diplomatik, Dokumentenedition und Schriftlabor

The Institute was established in 1897 as an auxiliary card-index unit attached to the manuscript department of the ducal library at Wolfenbüttel, its task being to identify, transcribe and date the medieval charters in that collection. It became a separate institution in 1932, suspended public work in 1943, reopened at its present address in 1951, and added a laboratory in 1974. It comprises six research divisions, a reference library of some 14,600 volumes and a document repair workshop. Of twenty-one established posts eighteen are occupied; three have been vacant since 2026 and may not be filled. The Institute receives a block grant from the Lower Saxony Ministry of Science and Culture and holds third-party funding from the German Research Foundation and from a church archive office.

Notice to readers, September 2026. The Institute remains open and its collections, card indexes and correspondence are in order, but since the reduction of its budget it works at the minimum compatible with the care of the material and with obligations already entered into. The reading room opens on Wednesday and Thursday, 10.00–15.30 and only against a written appointment; three posts stand vacant; no colloquium is being held this year; image capture has stopped; and three works are complete and unprinted for want of the printing budget. Written enquiries take up to twenty working days. The reasoning, and what has been set aside, are set out under History of the Institute.

News from the Institute

18 Sep 2026	The pages of this website are being revised twice a year while the Institute works at reduced scale LATEST The record for the year to September 2026 has been brought together — the divisional accounts, the figures and the changes to the card indexes — in place of the quarterly revision that was formerly made. Both revisions, in March and September, are now confined to what has actually changed; nothing new is being written for these pages while there is nobody to write it.
10 Sep 2026	The three vacant posts remain unfilled, and the conference has stopped asking for them A technical post in documentation has been vacant since December 2025, one in the laboratory since July 2025, and a half-time research post since February 2026. All three are frozen under the budget, and the conference of the Institute resolved in June 2026 not to apply for a dispensation again this year, on the ground that a refusal repeated three times is an answer. Division V accordingly consists of its head alone, and Division VI of one person where its own rules require two.
13 Jul 2026	The thirteenth colloquium is postponed without a new date The colloquium announced for September 2025 and then put back to September 2026 cannot be held: the papers offered cannot be dealt with, and the proceedings of the twelfth colloquium are themselves still unpublished. Twenty-nine papers already offered are held on file, and every author has been written to. The Institute will consider a fourteenth colloquium in 2028 if its circumstances allow — a form of words the conference adopted deliberately, there being no way at present of knowing whether they will.
1 Jun 2026	Reading room hours: two days, and by written appointment only Since 1 January 2026 the reading room has opened on Wednesday and Thursday from 10.00 to 15.30, and consultation is granted only against a written appointment confirmed in advance; the reference library joins it. The fortnightly house colloquium, which met 418 times between 1959 and December 2024, cannot be kept up on two days a week and is suspended until further notice.
2 Mar 2026	Digitisation: no new commissions, and the image archive is being checked rather than extended Division V has stopped taking in work from partner institutions under the image exchange agreement, because the checking it requires cannot be done by one person. What is being done instead is a slow verification of the existing archive, which is a matter of the safety of the material and costs nothing but time. No image has been captured at the Institute since December 2025.
15 Jan 2026	Budget for 2026 reduced; the Institute decides what to stop The block grant for consumables, travel, printing and equipment has been reduced by about eighteen per cent, and three vacant posts are frozen. The conference decided on 13 January to keep the care of the collections, the card indexes and obligations already entered into, and to set aside the rest: new projects, the revision of the reference numbers, the repair of the fibre projector, and this website's former quarterly revision. (See History.)
22 Jun 2026	The second volume of the Hildesheim charters goes to the printer, nine months later than planned The text and the indexes have been finished since 2025; the printing waited for the budget and for a place in the printer's programme. It is expected as series volume 37 in the first half of 2027. Three further works are complete and unprinted — the revised formulary types, the vocabulary of old signatures, and the eleventh supplement to the register of scribes — and no date can be given for them.
9 Apr 2026	The DFG project is extended by a year, to December 2028 The reallocation was agreed with the funding body in April. Some 380 of the 1,180 charters of the Brunswick–Lüneburg duchy have been transcribed and checked. The project is the only work at the Institute still being taken on at its former scale, and it is also the only one with money attached to it.
31 Mar 2025	First batch of the review of undated charters closed 210 charters examined, thirty-one date ranges narrowed, four earlier conclusions withdrawn and the cards corrected. The second batch of 210, selected in 2024, is listed and put back into the cabinet until there is somebody to do it.
11 Dec 2024	House colloquium: the 418th meeting, and the last for the present Held as ever on a Wednesday afternoon at 14.15. The paper was on the trial of a revised reference number — a revision since set aside — followed by the academic office's account of the year. Meetings resumed as monthly in 2025 and stopped at the end of that year; the record of all 418 is in the colloquium register (archive, KOL-1).

The six divisions, and what else is under this roof

Table 1 Research divisions and ancillary facilities, September 2026. Figures are posts occupied; three posts are vacant and frozen.
Div.	Name and remit	Head	Staff	Room
I	Numismatics and monetary history Numismatik und Geldgeschichte Description of coin types, weight and fineness, hoards and circulation, dies and seals	Dr M. Kaltenbrunner	3	Main building 1.04
II	Diplomatics and archival studies Diplomatik und Archivkunde Formularies, issue and authentication, seals and subscriptions, archival history	Dr J. Peters	4	Main building 1.07
III	Documentary editing Editionswissenschaft Editorial conventions, variants and transmission, commentary and indexes	Dr H. Schwabendiek	3	Main building 2.02
IV	Writing and manuscript culture Schrift- und Handschriftenkunde Development of scripts, identification of scribes, bindings and fragments, traces of use	Dr A. Remke	3	Main building 2.06
V	Documentation and digitisation Dokumentation und Digitalisierung The indexes and authority files, and the keeping of the image archive — one post, no new work taken on	Dr S. Andersen	1	Main building 0.03
VI	Laboratory and material analysis Labor und Materialanalyse Testing, so far as one person may test — second post vacant since July 2025	Dr T. Bruns	1	Laboratory building, ground floor
—	Reference library, reference only Fachbibliothek (Präsenzbestand)	Mrs C. Bauer	1	Main building 1.10
—	Document repair workshop Restaurierungswerkstatt	Mrs L. Vogel	1	Laboratory building, ground floor

Eighteen posts occupied of twenty-one established. The three vacant posts — extensions 28, 42 and 43 — are frozen under the budget of 2026 and their telephones are no longer answered. No student assistants have been employed since 2025, and the seven corresponding associates have not met since June 2024. Divisional work is described in each year's annual report and on the division pages.

Three pieces of work that never quite finish

1. Dating charters and coins

Four groups of evidence are used together: the form of the script, the ink, the paper or parchment, and the wear of seals and dies. The object is a date range, not a year. The card indexes begun by F. Overbeck in 1901 have produced some 1,900 case files since, of which about two thirds can still be checked against the objects themselves. The first batch of the current review was closed in March 2025; the second is listed and waiting.

Divisions II and VI, jointly

2. Minting and writing compared

The working periods of the mints of Lower Saxony and the upper Weser are set beside those of the scribes active in the same districts, in order to see how the circulation of coin, the production of administrative documents and the teaching of writing relate to one another in time. A priority of the Institute since 1978. The comparative chronology was finished in 2025 — seventy-four pages, with a table of 218 scribes — and is being read for publication.

Divisions I and IV, jointly

3. Editing the regional charters

Some four thousand charters of ducal, urban and monastic provenance, thirteenth to seventeenth century, are being edited to a single set of conventions, with commentary and with indexes of persons, places and subjects. Eleven volumes are in print. Volume 2 of the Hildesheim charters is at the printer; the DFG project on the Brunswick–Lüneburg charters has been extended by a year; and the printing of three further works is deferred for want of the money. The conventions are described in the prefaces to the volumes published.

Division III, with Division V

And, in the background: the cards

Eleven card indexes, 1,340 reels of microfilm and about 224,100 images are kept for the use of the Institute and of its partner archives. Roughly two thirds of the card stock is a duplicate set, held so that an enquiry can be answered without the originals leaving the strongroom. The indexes continue to grow, at about half the rate of 2023, the work being done by the same hands as everything else.

Division V and the archive

Figures for the year

Table 2 Holdings and annual turnover. Compiled by the academic office and corrected to 31 August 2026.
Item	2023	2024	2025	2026 to 31 Aug.
Cards in the eleven indexes	226,144	232,070	235,180	236,540
Reels of microfilm	1,284	1,340	1,340	1,340
Image negatives and digital images	211,077	221,090	223,450	224,100
Charters and coins newly accessioned	377	318	204	96
Visitors to the reading room	204	196	121	54
Written enquiries answered	806	834	702	388
Colloquia held / attendance	19 / 218	16 / 182	7 / 71	—
Posts occupied	21	21	20	18

On the counting of cards: each card counts as one entry, including cards written for a single item in several hands. Digital images include the scans of pre-2006 silver negatives, taken at 600 dpi and not distinguished in this table from material captured at 1200 dpi after 2010. No image has been captured since December 2025; the figure for 2026 represents checking and renumbering only, and will not grow until the post is filled. The conventions are summarised on the research data page.

A note on this website

These pages have kept the same layout since 2004; entries and links are corrected, the design is not replaced. That is not eccentricity. The Institute works on charters and on objects, and the website has one job — to announce and to be found. It is better for us that it stays legible and unsurprising. Since the reduction of 2026 the pages are revised twice a year rather than quarterly, so a visitor may find a date here up to six months old; where something has changed in the meantime, the change is noted at the head of the page concerned. If a page displays oddly, if a link is dead, or if something here is plainly wrong, please write to the academic office (sekretariat [at] winddew.lab), allowing for the longer time we now take to answer.

Most recent revision of these pages: 18 September 2026

Ten news items brought together for the year to September 2026; the notice of reduced service revised; the annual figures carried to 31 August 2026; the list of staff corrected for the three vacant posts; and the colloquium recorded as postponed. The revision was made, as the March one was, by the academic office alone (Mrs M. Tiedemann), which is one of the reasons it is now made twice a year.

Why the Institute is working at reduced scale · Projects, in hand and set aside · Annual report 2024/25 · Research data

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