Gemeinschaft-Zeugen-Vernetzungen. Inszenierte Gemeinschaften im frühmittelalterlichen Bayern

Abstract
Networking and presentation are modern terms, which increasingly have accessed the terminology of medieval studies. They serve the purpose of characterisation interactions of social communities and social phenomena from different kinds. While these are easily identifiable in the context of narrative historiography, there are only rarely pieces of evidence found within pragmatic literacy that display the connections of humans and social groups. For a long time, the names of witnesses in charters and administrative documents have been subject to scientific investigations, be it to trace families and regional aristocratic groups or to prove the presence of larger associations of persons on a political gathering, for instance at a court or imperial meeting.
The ‘Freisinger Traditionsbuch’ by Cozroh transmits a rich variety of masculine names of witnesses, which become visible at the end of the charters and notes of donations and other economic transactions, in each case in a group-like manner. Who were those people? Was there a separate group of people that functioned as a network of witnesses or was this group of witnesses assembled in each case differently? To answer those questions, the text refers back to the early medieval culture of the Bavarian duchy, precisely in the area of the diocese Freising and aims at making the community of authorities, the contract partners and witnesses and their networks for the time period of the years 765 to 843 plausible, according to a few selected examples.