Informace o publikaci
How formulaic are inquisition records? Measuring lexical richness and text similarity in a corpus of Latin notarial documents
| Autoři | |
|---|---|
| Rok publikování | 2024 |
| Druh | Další prezentace na konferencích |
| Fakulta / Pracoviště MU | |
| Citace | |
| Popis | It is a widely accepted axiom that medieval inquisition records, just as many other types of notarial documents, are formulaic. However, the only notion of different degrees of formulaicity is that some registers – such as the register of Jacques Fournier famously studied by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie – are “less formulaic”, and thus “exceptional”. This exceptionality has even become, deservedly or not, an indication of reliability, which invests formulaicity with critical importance. It is thus surprising that there exist no empirical studies which would actually measure the formulaicity of medieval inquisition records, thus allowing us to systematically compare between them and inform the source criticism of this contested type of text. To bridge this gap, we apply methods of lexical richness measurement and text similarity analysis to an expertly cleaned corpus of digitized editions of Latin-language medieval inquisition records (ca. 1,300,000 tokens). This allows us to express that the formulaicity of inquisition records, rather than a universal feature with anecdotic exceptions, is actually a distribution on a scale, where some registers are significantly more formulaic than others. We achieve this by investigating the distribution, diversity, and similarity of types, tokens, as well as larger segments of text, combining this with our knowledge of the texts in order to interpret the results. Besides comparing individual registers with one another, we are able to compare the degree of formulaicity between different genres of heresy trial records (such as the formulaicity of depositions vs. sentences vs. abjurations), since a part of our corpus (ca. 700,000 tokens) is segmented into specific documents provided with genre metadata. |
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