Papal Delegated Jurisdiction

The project examines the practice and dissemination of papal delegated jurisdiction on the Iberian Peninsula in the 12th century. In doing so, it focuses on a region for which greater progress in source indexing has been made in recent years, so that a large-scale comparative study is now possible. Methodologically, the project breaks new ground by applying Digital History approaches, which bring together the traditional method of source criticism with critical "computational thinking" and macroscopic analytical procedures.

As material basis serves a corpus of documents comprising around 1,400 papal charters, enriched with metadata, mapping the Rome relations of the entire Iberian Peninsula and serving as a foil against which the practice of papal delegated jurisdiction can be placed in the larger context of the general centering on the papacy. In the course of the corpus creation, the project is working on the edition of 'Papsturkunden in Spanien IV' closing the still existing edition gap on papal documents of the Kingdom of León and the Spanish Knight orders. By means of macroscopic analysis procedures, the entire source inventory will be described spatially, temporally and formally and prepared for in-depth studies.

With the analysis of actor networks and formulaic writing the project explores two central dimensions of the dissemination process. Using methods of historical network research, the litigants and judges involved in the court proceedings are examined in their relations to each other as well as to the papacy in order to uncover spatio-temporal clusters that are to be historically evaluated and interpreted. In this way, it can be asked whether a pioneering role emerges for certain individuals/groups or whether common characteristics emerge that allow to associate the spread of delegated jurisdiction with certain clerical groups or milieus.

Closely related to this, the project examines the language of documents, specifically the spread of formulaic elements in papal judicial letters. Among other things, the question is to what extent the genesis and consolidation of formulas can be linked back to the course of concrete disputes, and whether clusters can be identified for their dissemination that can be related to personal interconnections. In addition to the manual collation of known formulas and clauses, the project is testing a data-centered identification of formulaic elements using text mining methods.