Die Register Innocenz' III. 11 Band. 11. Pontifikatsjahr 1208/1209: Texte und Indices. Edited by Othmar Hageneder and Andrea Sommerlechner, with Christoph Egger, Rainer Murauer, Reinhard Selinger, and Herwig Weigl. [Publikationen des Historischen Instituts beim Osterreichischen Kulturinstitut in Rom, ?. Abteilung: Quellen, 1. Reihe.] (Vienna: Osterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften. 2010. Pp. xcii, 532. $254.00 paperback. ISBN 978-3-700-16544-6.) It is now some sixty years since Leo Santifaller, at that time both head of the Osterreichischen Staatsarchivs and director of the Instituts fur Osterreichische Geschichtsforschung, in alliance with Friedrich Kempf and Friedrich Schmidinger, decided upon the great historical enterprise of an Austrian critical edition of the registers of Pope Innocent ?? (1198-1216), which would replace the often seriously flawed texts published in Jacques-Paul Migne's Patrologia Latina (1844-55). The initial progress of the enterprise was slow, given that the principal editor, Othmar Hageneder, and his associates could not dedicate themselves to the task on a full-time basis, but happily in recent years, with Hageneder still at the helm, an exceptional team of editors and researchers is now moving the project forward at a considerable pace. Nine years of registers have now been published, and in the latest volume, the letters of Register Vat. 7A, 49-101 have been transcribed. They concern the eleventh year of Innocent's pontificate and contain 271 letters from February 1208 to February 1209. With the exception of the register of Pope Gregory Vn (1073-85), which contains some 390 items, the registers of Innocent HTs predecessors in the high Middle Ages do not survive, although some of them at least were certainly conserved and consulted both by curial officials and visitors to Rome into the middle of the thirteenth century. This makes the almost complete sur- vival of Innocent's registers all the more valuable, even though it has resulted in a tendency on the part of historians to ascribe to Innocent ?? any number of innovations that were often no more than a continuance of papal thought over a longer period, as we can often know from letters of previous popes that survive in local archives or through decretal collections. The major limi- tation of Innocent's registers is that they do not cover all the business con- ducted by the Roman Curia. It is important to emphasize that only a small number of letters were enregistered, and how one letter found its way into the register and why another is left out is often far from clear. Most privileges to monastic houses, for instance, do not find their way into the registers, pos- sibly because the cost of enregistering a letter proved prohibitive and not central to the monastery's purpose in obtaining the privilege. But even mat- ters of high politics were sometimes left out. It is therefore always necessary to be aware of the very many letters surviving in local archives that supple- ment those conserved in the registers. …