Michael Gockel, Die urkundliche Überlieferung des Klosters Fulda zu Thüringen in der Karolingerzeit: Beiträge zum Quellenwert und zur Toponymie des Landes. Veröffentlichungen der historischen Kommission für Thüringen, Kleine Reihe, 67. Cologne: Böhlau, 2024, pp. 245, 14 color plates, 1 removeable map.

From the third quarter of the eighth century onwards, the monastery of Fulda played a central role in the religious, political, economic, and military affairs of the Carolingian Empire, the East Frankish realm, and subsequently in Ottonian Germany. This great influence was built, in large part, on the prodigious number and size of the donations of property made to this monastery by the ruling dynasties and by at least two thousand individual, private donors. The most substantial source of information regarding these property donations is the Codex Eberhardi, dated to ca. 1160, which is named after the monk of Fulda, who copied information regarding the property holdings of the monastery dating back to the abbacy of Rabanus Maurus (822–842). Unfortunately, Eberhard consistently left out information that was available to him from earlier sources, including compendia of donations, known as cartularies which had been preserved within the monastery’s archives. As a result, scholars have struggled for well over a century to reconstruct the holdings of Fulda at particular times, to identify the specific places that were granted, and also the identities of those who donated property to the monastery.