Aim of the project is to collect all kinds of normative sources (police ordinances; instructions for seigniorial officers and servants; ordinances, regulations, mandates and decrees concerning the economic activities of the landlords and the subjects; orders, mandates, directives, etc. concerning the process of confessionalisation of the subjects) produced in the administration of two estates to be edited at the example of Austria below the Enns from the end of the sixteenth century up to the peasant emancipation of 1848. From today’s view the following two estates or complexes of estates are particularly appropriate: the estates of the Liechtensteins in the north-eastern corner of Lower Austria – Feldsberg [today Valtice, in the Czech Republic] and Wilfersdorf – as well as the estates of the canons regular of St. Augustine in Klosterneuburg. It is planned to prepare a “classical” edition of sources in full length with summaries of the edited sources (Regesten) and an index published as a book and a digitally publication in form of a relational databank system on the internet, which will constructed in a way, that it can be used as a platform for further editions of sources of estates in the future. Different from neighbouring Bohemia and Moravia, such an edition so far doesn’t exist for any of the Austrian provinces. The archives of the estates, which were chosen for the project, are preserved very well and are characterised by good accessibility.

The project intends to make a corpus of sources available to scholars that is beside questions on the administration of estates in the narrow sense suitable, too, for the research of the judicial, social, economic and cultural circumstances of life of the subject population.