Documentary Formulae as Text Reuse Templates: Constat and Manifestus Clauses in Early Medieval Latin Charters

This paper seeks to develop a digital diplomatic approach for reducing medieval charters’ documentary formulae into text reuse templates that represent their variational subtypes. The paper also tests this approach by visualizing the variation of two, partly mutually competing, formulae. The research data consists of 1,024 constat and manifestus clauses extracted from Latin charters written in Tuscany in the eighth to tenth centuries. Charters largely consist of formulae, which are prefabricated semi-fixed expressions of juridical content and recur in varying forms in charters of the same type. The complex interplay of documentary text reuse elements in time and place can be used to investigate historical drifts of documentary production and underlying administrative and cultural changes. The computer-assisted text reuse approach proposed is expected to be applicable to large datasets and scalable to other historical contexts.