Abstract
Although the Roman Rota was one of the most important courts of justice in Europe from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, there are but few records of its activities preserved today in the Vatican Archive or the archives in partibus. These official documents contain the names of the presiding judge (auditor sacri palatii), the public notary who issued them, and two or more legal witnesses - usually also notaries who worked as scribes for the presiding auditor. Thus, collecting and analysing this information in Rota charters makes it possible to identify personal networks surrounding individual auditors at the Roman Curia. My article compares the transmission of Rota charters in partibus with the Vatican registers as recorded in „Repertorium Germanicum“ (RG). Especially for the years of the Great Schism (1378 to 1417), locally archived Rota charters can help to fill some of the blank spaces in the Vatican and Roman sources that first become more informative in the course of the fifteenth century. A comparative analysis of both forms of transmission, however, also underlines the wellknown problems of inconsistently applied formal rules and content selection criteria that always have to be considered when working with RG.
