Germania Sacra. The Church of the Holy Roman Empire and Its Institutions

The Germania Sacra gains access to and publishes the written records concerned with the Church of the Holy Roman Empire, the backbone of the Western sacred and secular order. The sources are the basis for reference books tracing the history of the church and its institutions from their beginning in the 3rd and 4th centuries until their dissolution during the Reformation or, respectively, during the time of secularization at the beginning of the 19th century.

Since January 2008, the Germania Sacra project has belonged to the Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Göttingen. Concurrently, with the resumption of the project, forthcoming reference books will be published in the “Dritte Folge”, which focuses on the description of the dioceses and cathedral chapters, lying within the borders of the Federal Republic of Germany.

The sources are used in a consistent way in order to make structured and comparable data of the church of the Holy Roman Empire available for further research. The Germania Sacra creates a basis for further investigation of constitutional history, church history, the history of the Holy Roman Empire, regional history, economic history, social history, educational history, geographical history and the history of human settlements, prosopography, history of consciousness, history of piety and the patron saints of the Middle Ages and the (Early) Modern Times.