Abouth the Project

Electronic Archive of Serbian Medieval Heritage (eASSB in Serbian) is conceived of as a database containing texts of sources for medieval Serbian history in electronic form. The initial phase of the project includes the processing of the documentary material (charters and epistles; seal, fresco and coin inscriptions; epigraphs), followed by narrative sources (hagiographies, chronicles, genealogies etc). The project encompasses the material in Medieval Serbian, Greek and Latin from the whole of the Balkans, with an emphasis on the sources relevant to the activity of the Serbian rulers, nobility, church dignitaries and institutions. The database mainly relies on the latest editions, and each entry (text) is supplied with basic information drawn from the cited literature.

In addition to full texts in electronic form the eASSB provides an index offering the possibility of searching for particular concepts and personal and geographic names. Each index item is supplied with references to its exact place in documents or sources. The search operates by means of links for Medieval Serbian texts, and by keywords for the others.

The electronic Archive is intended primarily for researchers, offering them the possibility to find compiled in one place the original material scattered in many different and not always easily available editions. The planned mounting of the material and data translated into modern languages would make the database accessible to a wider circle of users interested in the Serbian Middle Ages, including foreign scholars.

The Electronic Archive of Serbian Medieval Heritage is being developed as a supplement to the project “Medieval Heritage of the Balkans: Institutions and Culture” of the Institute for Balkan Studies, Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, supported by the Ministry of Science of the Republic of Serbia (No. 147012). The idea of the Archive has begun to materialize owing to the support and participation of the former director of the Institute Dr. Dušan T. Bataković, Dr. Danica Popović, member of the Institute and project director, and Prof. Dr. Smilja Marjanović-Dušanić, Chair of the History of the Middle Ages and Auxiliary Historical Sciences, Faculty of Philosophy, Belgrade. The eASSB project is being realized by the historians Veljko Gluščević, author of the project, and Žarko Vujošević, member of the Institute.

The work on the eASSB project conforms to the current trends in West European medieval studies as expressed in similar projects in Germany and France such as eMGH and CEI (Munich) and ELEC (Paris). Computer technology has already enabled the creation of extensive electronic corpuses of Latin documents. In comparison with classical forms, such digital databases display significant advantages, especially in terms of easy access to and search through the textual material. Nonetheless, the scholarly community is yet to address the issue of defining general conceptual and technical guidelines that might help create a “global information space” in historical studies.The integration of Serbian medieval studies into these processes is one of the objectives of the eASSB project. Its initial phase has been made available on the website of the Institute for Balkan Studies. This is a work in progress, and all comments and suggestions are welcome at the following email addresses: