BESSEL, JOHANN GEORG. – Benedictine monk, born at Buchheim (Electorate of Mainz) on 5 September 1672, died at Göttweig (Lower Austria) on 20 (or 22) January 1749. Abbot of Göttweig (7 February 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, although its plan remained unfinished at the beginning, was the Chronicon Gottwicense.
B. intended to publish all the documents relating to the history of the celebrated abbey, and prefaced them with a general introduction consisting of a threefold treatment of the geography of medieval Germany, the diplomas of the German princes, and the palaeography of German monasteries (Heidelberg and Wolfenbüttel are lacking). This introduction 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 Mabillon’s theories, the work is noteworthy because it represents the first treatise on special palaeography and the first detailed and systematic investigation of diplomatics. Scholars still debate the authorship of the work; some wish to attribute it to Franz Josef von Hahn (1699–1748), B.’s collaborator and later archbishop of Bamberg, whom the abbot is said to have commissioned to compile II. It is generally admitted, however, that B., under whose name the work appeared, deserves the principal credit for II. Of the extensive material collected for the Chronicon, only a single volume appeared (Tegernsee 1781), under the direction of Magnus Klein, B.’s successor.