Capitularia

The project is working on a new edition of the Frankish rulers’ decrees (“capitularies”), which are among the central legal sources of the European Middle Ages.

page of a medieval manuscript with legal writing and a rubric in red

Link

https://capitularia.uni-koeln.de

Runtime

2014–2029

project participants

Historical Institute of the University of Cologne, CCeH, North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts. Project lead: Prof. Dr. Karl Ubl. For editors and participants, see https://capitularia.uni-koeln.de/project/staff/.

Funding

Funded by the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts.

Description

The project is working on a new edition of the capitularies with the aim of doing justice to the special transmission situation of this source genre. On the one hand, the capitularies are to be critically edited as individual pieces and published in their reconstructed form with translation in book form; on the other hand, the collections central to the history of their impact and reception are to be analysed and made accessible to researchers in a digital edition.

With the transcriptions of the individual collections of capitularies, the digital edition not only provides the basis for the critical print edition, but is also designed as a permanent supplement to it. For historical research, it is not only the original, reconstructed wording that is of interest, but also the (re-)combination and (re-)ordering as well as the actual wording in which these texts were transmitted, read and used, as preserved in the collections. The combination of digital and print editions documents the path from the critical text back to the individual witnesses of tradition and acknowledges the intrinsic historical value of the collections. At the same time, the project website provides the opportunity to combine and present new findings on the form and transmission of capitularies. The digital edition runs under WordPress with several specifically developed plugins. The XSLT transformation from TEI to HTML runs on a CCeH VM using Saxon.

Picture credits

Capitulare legibus additum [BK 39]; Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Lat. 10758, fol. 81r (legal compendium from ca. 850–880, owned by the Archbishop Hinkmar of Reims), https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8423828c/f93.item.