mark mersiowsky and Konstanz.22 Since the early 1950s, wills have attracted increasing interest, but primarily in investigations of social and cultural historical questions.23 Furthermore, classical legal history studies deal with wills and inheritance law.24 However, there seem to have been no studies made on the diplomatics of municipal wills. Important preliminary work can be found in the introductions to editions and regests and in some dissertations.25 Late medieval diplomatics in Germany have indeed been neglected in research; there is no useful overview of the multitude of deeds, deed forms, and other types of business records which constitute the bulk of the late medieval archives. In the rich literature on wills, diplomatic studies in the proper sense are rather exceptions. For the treatment of municipal wills, I have undertaken a comparison of the holdings of three large imperial city archives in the German southwest: Ulm, Esslingen, and Reutlingen. Imperial cities are cities whose lord was the king or emperor and which therefore enjoyed relatively greater freedom and a considerable degree of autonomy.26 In furtherance of this status, at an early stage they created an administration and established archives. The three archives are of different rank, although all three towns were rich trading and commercial towns. Esslingen and Ulm date back to the Carolingian period, Esslingen with a pilgrimage site in the possession of Fulrad of Saint-Denis, Ulm with a Carolingian palace. Reutlingen, on the other hand, is a town below the Achalm, a large imperial castle of the 11th century. All became imperial cities in the 12th and 13th centuries and each even formed its own small territory. Ulm was the supra-regional capital, Esslingen the regional capital, Reutlingen a medium-sized imperial town. All three possess extensive, old archives with large medieval holdings. Upon the dissolution of the Old Empire in 21 Emmerich 2009; Kleinjung 2009. 22 Baur 1989. 23 Brandt 1973; Boockmann 1983; Zahnd 1988; Signori 1997; Guzzetti 2007; Rüther 2007; Kloerss 2012–2013; Pajcic 2013; Schmitz 2014–2015; Maass 2018. Loose 1980; Hartinger 1993; Tappe 1996; Bettin-Volksdorf 2003; Favreau-Lilie 2005; Steinführer 2015; Dormeier 2019. 24 Cf. Arnold 1965; Heuser 2002; Seif 2005; Schmidt-Recla 2011. 25 Schulz 1976, pp. 11–18; Bongermino 2020, pp. 61–105. 26 Selzer 2019. 21
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