Access to medieval archival sources has become much easier over the past decades thanks to mass digitization and IT-based solutions that are being developed in recent times. Exciting and previously seemingly unfeasible projects can now be planned and research times have become considerably shorter. All a researcher has to do is enter the databases and type the appropriate keywords in the search field ... Or do they? This is of course a provocative and incorrect statement, but overall it is indeed much easier to access archival records today … if only we can find all the surviving documents on our subject .... and, once found, interpret and identify indirect information that is often not included in the text of the document. Archival science and research methods can help us to do this. The presentation will give suggestions on how to use these methods through two small concrete research projects.
Within the context of Italian-Hungarian relations, one example attempts to reconstruct the surviving archives of a Florentine merchant in Hungary, while the other example attempts to analyze the role of the Hungarian royal chancellery in the flow of information in Europe in the mid-15th century.
Krisztina Arany holds a PhD from the Medieval Studies Department of the Central European University. Her main research interests are medieval economic and social history, with a special focus on Italian-Hungarian relations, artisan mobility and long-distance trade. After completing her studies, she worked at the National Archives of Hungary, where she headed the Hungarica Research Team and was head of the Department of Private Archives and Collections of the Central Archives of NAH. She is currently working at the Austrian State Archives as the Archival Delegate of Hungary in Vienna under the 1926 Austro-Hungarian Baden Convention and continues to coordinate the research and mass digitization of Hungarica documents.