BESSEL, JOHANN GEORG. - Benedictine monk, b. at Buchheim (Electorate of Mainz) on 5 Sept. 1672, d. at Göttweig (Lower Austria) on 20 (or 22) Jan. 1749. Abbot of Göttweig (7 Feb. 1714) and rector of the University of Vienna, he carried out various diplomatic missions and left several liturgical, theological and polemical writings (especially against Jansenism and Quietism), most of them published in Vienna between 1696 and 1732. The work that brought him the greatest fame, however, although its plan remained unfinished after its beginnings, was the Chronicon Gottwicense.
B. intended to publish all the documents relating to the history of the famous abbey, and he prefaced them, as a general introduction, with a threefold treatise on the geography of medieval Germany, on the diplomas of the German princes and on the paleography of German monasteries (Heidelberg and Wolfenbüttel are missing), which occupies the two tomes of vol. I, published under the title Chronicon Gottwicense, seu annales liberi et exempli monasterii Gottwicensis ord. s. Benedicti... Tomus prodromus: De codicibus antiquis manuscriptis, de imperatorum ac regum Germaniae diplomatibus, de eorumdem palatiis, vilis et curtibus regis atque de Germaniae medii aevi pagis praemissitur (in-fol., Tegernsee 1732). Although its approach does not depart from the theories of Mabillon, the work is remarkable because it represents the first treatise of special paleography and the first particular and homogeneous investigation of diplomatics. Scholars still debate the authorship of the work, which some wish to attribute to Franz Josef von Hahn (1699-1748), a collaborator of B. and later archbishop of Bamberg, to whom the abbot is said to have entrusted the compilation: it is generally admitted, however, that the chief merit belongs to B., under whose name the work appeared. Of the ample material collected for the Chronicon, only a single volume appeared (Tegernsee 1781), under the direction of Magnus Klein, B.'s successor.