BESSEL, Johann Georg. — Benedictine monk, born at Buchheim (Electorate of Mainz) on 5 Sept. 1672, died at Göttweig (Lower Austria) on 20 (or 22) Jan. 1749. Abbot of Göttweig (7 Feb. 1714) and rector of the University of Vienna, he undertook various diplomatic missions and left several liturgical, theological, and polemical writings (especially against Jansenism and Quietism), most of which were published in Vienna between 1696 and 1732. The work that brought him the greatest fame, though his plan remained unfinished at the outset, was the Chronicon Gottwienese.
B. intended to publish all the documents relating to the history of the celebrated abbey, and as a general introduction he planned a threefold treatment: on the geography of medieval Germany, on the charters of the German princes, and on the palaeography of German monasteries (Heidelberg and Wolfenbüttel are missing). This occupies the two volumes of the first part, which appeared under the title Chronicon Gottwienese, seu analecta librorum et exempli monasterii Gottwienesi ord. s. Benedicti... Tomus prodromus: De codicibus antiquis manuscriptis, de imperatorum ac regum Germaniae diplomatibus, de eorumdem palatii, villis et curribus regis atque de Germaniae medii aevi pagis praemittitur (folio, Tegernsee 1732). Although the approach does not depart from the theories of Mabillon, the work is noteworthy as the first treatise on special palaeography and the first particular and homogeneous investigation in diplomatics. Scholars still debate the authorship of the work, which some attribute to Franz Josef von Hahn (1699–1748), a collaborator of B. and later Archbishop of Bamberg, whom the abbot is said to have commissioned to compile it; yet it is generally admitted that the principal merit belongs to B., under whose name the work appeared. Of the extensive material collected for the Chronicon, only one volume was published (Tegernsee 1781), under the direction of Magnus Klein, B.’s successor.