This critical edition of Merovingian and Carolingian charters was edited by the German philologist Karl Zeumer, and published in 1886. Zeumer built on the work of previous editors, most notably the French archivist, Eugène de Rozière, who published an edition in 1854. The charters are grouped by editor, beginning with the Formulae Andecavenses, a collection of sixth- and seventh-century charters first edited in the seventeenth century by the French Benedictine monk, Mabillon. A former student of classical philology at the universities of Göttingen and Leipzig, Zeumer joined the Monumenta Germaniae Historica project in 1875. This series of published primary sources, which continues to this day, used historical scholarship to buttress the growing Romantic nationalism of the nineteenth century. Zeumer received his Ph.D. from Göttingen in 1877, and in 1886 he received an honorary degree from the University of Heidelberg, where he began teaching as a lecturer the following year.