This course introduces students to diplomatics: the study of the creation, form, and transmission of written records. Besides literary texts copied in manuscripts, written evidence from the Middle Ages takes the form of archival documents — charters, contracts, account books, testaments, notarial protocols, administrative minutes, court records, and so forth — produced by royal, papal, imperial and municipal chanceries. Diplomatic sources, which often survive in a single copy, present modern historians and editors with special problems. Training in reading diplomatic sources from the eighth to the fifteenth century and diplomatic editing is provided through weekly exercises.