DIPLOMATICS. - Diplomatics (from diploma, understood in the broad sense of "document") is the science that studies public and private acts for the purpose of determining the criteria needed to establish their authenticity. Diplomatic criticism contributes to historical criticism, but is not identical with it: so much so that a diplomatic "forgery" may correspond to a historical truth and vice versa. Diplomatics avails itself of the aid of other sciences such as paleography, chronology, sigillography, and the history of law.
The criticism of documents for the purpose of recognizing or denying their authenticity is very ancient: examples are cited from 590, 843, 1125, 1198 (the bull of Innocent III to the archdeacon and canon of Milan [4 Sept.], in which the norms are suggested for recognizing the characteristics that give authenticity to pontifical documents: Potthast, 365), 1289, and many others from the 14th and 15th centuries. It was always a matter, however (even in the case of Petrarch, who dealt, in 1361, with the alleged privileges of Julius Caesar and Nero), of documents presented in court or in support of some right or privilege, upon which criticism was exercised not in search of authenticity and truth, but in defense of a material interest; the same may be said of the bella diplomatica, which after the Peace of Westphalia flooded Germany with books and pamphlets: nothing other than lawyers' briefs for and against cities and churches, from which science received no impulse.
It was Mabillon (1632-1707) who gave the criticism of documents a scientific form and organization, that is, who—contrary to the practice prevailing until then—made it disinterested.
The Jesuit Daniel van Papenbroeck, in the preface to vol. II of the Acta SS. Aprilis (ed. Antwerp 1675, pp. 1-XXXI), had invalidated as forgeries the ancient documents of the French Benedictines, collected for about a century in the Congregation of St. Maur, and especially those of the monastery of St-Denis, printed in 1625. Papenbroeck adhered to an excessively skeptical system and to Marsham's aphorism that documents are the less trustworthy the more ancient they are. The Benedictine Jean Mabillon (v.) replied to the Jesuit in 1681 with the work De re diplomatica libri VI, in which he did not assume the negative attitude of the polemicist, but rather built the science of diplomatics from its foundations, gathering material also from the scholars of his time (as from Antonio Magliabechi), yet with intuitions so brilliant that certain statements are substantially correct even today. Mabillon's work immediately found some envious persons and some detractors, but it was received with the general consensus of scholars and of Papenbroeck himself (cf. letter to Mabillon of 20 July 1683: «Tu porro quoties res tulerit, audacter testare, quam totus in tuam sententiam iverim»).
Only a few Jesuits and one Protestant, the Englishman Hickes (1703), attempted to assail it, against whom some Italians also wrote, such as Giusto Fontanini, Domenico Lazzarini and others. Mabillon meanwhile was preparing a second edition, which appeared posthumously in 1709. Today it may be said that for general diplomatics (intrinsic and extrinsic characteristics of the document, importance of chanceries, principles of criticism, value of copies and originals) Mabillon is the standard, while he has been superseded in special diplomatics.
Between 1750 and 1765 two other Maurist fathers, R.-P. Tassin and C. Toustain, published the Nouveau traité de diplomatique, in 6 vols., with which they expanded and set out to deepen the master's work. From Mabillon and from the Nouveau traité derived, until the middle of the 19th century, all the diplomatic treatises published in France, Germany, and Italy.
In Italy Scipione Maffei, in 1727, having noted that the practice of continually repeating what had already been written by others had become too widespread, proposed a collection of documents of various origins and various regions, giving a prominent place to private charters: he was meditating, that is, an attempt at special diplomatics; Muratori, in dissertation XXXIV of the Antiquitates Italicae Medi Aevi: De diplomatibus et chartis antiquis dubiis aut falsis, gave various examples of forged documents, pointing out the criteria to which the scholar must adhere and showing how even a series of forgeries can constitute a historical documentation, if the reasons for the falsification are investigated. Chairs of diplomatics also arose in Italy, in the Universities of Bologna (1765), Naples, and Milan; here Angelo Fumagalli (v.) taught, among others, author of 2 vols. of Istituzioni diplomatiche (1796, but published in 1802), derived always from the Nouveau traité, but rich in personal contribution as regards Italian documents, of which Fumagalli demonstrated an excellent knowledge also in the Antichità longobardiche milanesi (Milan 1792-93) and in the Codice diplomatico ambrosiano (ibid. 1805).
In Germany Christoph Gatterer, in the Elementa artis diplomaticae universalis (Göttingen 1765), attempted to classify scripts with a system similar to that introduced by Linnaeus in the field of the natural sciences, calling the uncial ciceronium, the cursive svetonium, etc.; the strange attempt remained sterile, but the University of Göttingen, where Gatterer taught, became a seminary of excellent diplomatists, who secured for Germany a true primacy in this field.
The French Revolution cut short the study of ancient documents; Napoleon himself confused diplomatics and diplomacy. The great awakening came after the Restoration, with the new direction given to diplomatics, which was transformed from general into special. The historical institutes and the historical deputations and societies founded in Europe contributed to this in particular, first among all the Ecole des Chartes of Paris (1821). In France L. Delisle, N. de Wailly, Mas-Latrie, and A. Giry distinguished themselves; in Italy G. Marini, C. Paoli, P. Torelli, G. Vittani, N. Barone, L. Schiaparelli, Garufi, Brandileone, Datta, and Russi; in Germany Bresslau, Meister, Böhmer, Potthast, Pertz, Jaffé, Kehr, Voltelini, Pflug-Harttung, Sickel, and Brunner.
Today the era of general diplomatics may be said to have passed, for it is only a basis and a precedent for special diplomatics, which tends to "consider documents in the light of our knowledge of the juridical, administrative, and economic state of the country and the epoch, to study them in relation to intellectual culture and civilization" (de Boijard).