Urban privileges (‘keuren’) in medieval Flanders: charters or dynamic legal documents?

Dating medieval English charters

Deeds, or charters, dealing with property rights, provide a continuous documentation which can be used by historians to study the evolution of social, economic and political changes. This study is concerned with charters (written in Latin) dating from the tenth through early fourteenth centuries in England. Of these, at least one million were left undated, largely due to administrative changes ...

Automatic Writer Identification in Medieval Papal Charters

Automatic writer identification and writer verification has recently received significant attention in the field of historical analysis. In this work a short overview of current approaches for writer identification is given. Current state-of-the-art results on contemporary data are related to different approaches for writer verification on a small dataset of datum lines extracted from papal cha...

Challenges in Annotating Medieval Latin Charters

No annotation guidelines concerning substandard Latin are presently available. This paper describes an annotation style of substandard Latin that supplements the method designed for standard Latin by the Perseus Latin Dependency Treebank and the Index Thomisticus Treebank. Each word of the corpus can be assigned only one morphological analysis. In our system, the analysis can be either function...

Epistolary Documents in High-Medieval History- Writing

Legal Competition in the Medieval World

We develop a model of competition between legal systems with overlapping jurisdictions based on Hotelling competition that suggests that, absent institutional reform, courts with overlapping jurisdictions will be driven to adopt divergent legal doctrines in order to extract rents from agents with heterogeneous preferences over which doctrine is applied to their case. This has the effect of weak...