Comparer des méthodes

	Diplomatics	Witness Reliability Triangulation
Domaine	Historiography	Historiography
Famille	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Année d'origine	1681	1970
Auteur d'origine	Jean Mabillon (De re diplomatica)	Classical source-critical tradition; formalized via triangulation in social science
Type	qualitative formal-analytic method	qualitative evidential method
Source fondatrice	Guyotjeannin, O., Pycke, J., & Tock, B.-M. (1993). Diplomatique medievale (L'Atelier du medieviste, 2). Brepols. ISBN: 9782503503127	Howell, M., & Prevenier, W. (2001). From Reliable Sources: An Introduction to Historical Methods. Cornell University Press. ISBN: 9780801485602
Alias	Diplomatic, Diplomatique, Urkundenlehre, Charter Criticism	Source Triangulation, Corroboration Analysis, Testimony Cross-Checking, Convergence of Evidence
Apparentées	4	4
Résumé	Diplomatics is the science that studies the form, structure, and genesis of documents, above all the solemn legal instruments of the Middle Ages such as charters, diplomas, and acts. Founded as a discipline by the Benedictine scholar Jean Mabillon, whose De re diplomatica (1681) answered Jesuit doubts about the authenticity of Merovingian charters, it provides a rigorous procedure for deciding whether a document is genuine and for dating and localizing it. The method rests on the observation that documents produced by a given chancery follow highly regular conventions: a fixed sequence of parts, recurring verbal formulae, standard modes of validation by seal and subscription. By dissecting a document into its constituent elements and comparing each against attested norms, the diplomatist detects forgeries, interpolations, and anachronisms, and pins a document to a place and time. Diplomatics is thus the most formalized branch of external source criticism.	Witness reliability triangulation is the procedure by which a historian combines several testimonies about the same event to reach a justified conclusion about what happened. It rests on a simple but powerful logic: a single account, however vivid, may be mistaken or self-serving, but when independent sources that could not have colluded converge on the same point, the probability that they are all wrong in the same way becomes small. The method, descended from the classical source-critical tradition and sharpened by the social-scientific concept of triangulation associated with Donald Campbell and Norman Denzin, requires the historian to inventory the available testimonies, assess each one's reliability and bias through internal criticism, establish whether the sources are genuinely independent, and then treat their agreement as corroboration while explaining their disagreements. The same Bayesian intuition underlies the use of multiple, independent evidentiary streams in process-tracing case analysis. Triangulation is how disparate, fallible sources are turned into defensible historical knowledge.