Description
In the expanse of medieval history, amidst the crisis of the church and state, Gratian emerges as a pivotal yet often overlooked figure, renowned for his pioneering work in canon law. His seminal text, Concordia Discordantium Canonum (The Harmony of Discordant Canons), brought order to the cacophony of contradictory laws within the Catholic church that had accumulated over centuries. The discovery of the text’s first recension—an earlier edition that is approximately half of the size of its more widely known counterpart—has opened new avenues of inquiry. Our research delves into the evolution of Gratian's magnum opus, particularly exploring the topical differences between its first and second recensions. Through computational analysis techniques such as lemmatization, we aim to unravel the linguistic and doctrinal shifts between these editions of Gratian’s work.
A Computational Analysis of Gratian’s Decretum (c. 1140)
In the expanse of medieval history, amidst the crisis of the church and state, Gratian emerges as a pivotal yet often overlooked figure, renowned for his pioneering work in canon law. His seminal text, Concordia Discordantium Canonum (The Harmony of Discordant Canons), brought order to the cacophony of contradictory laws within the Catholic church that had accumulated over centuries. The discovery of the text’s first recension—an earlier edition that is approximately half of the size of its more widely known counterpart—has opened new avenues of inquiry. Our research delves into the evolution of Gratian's magnum opus, particularly exploring the topical differences between its first and second recensions. Through computational analysis techniques such as lemmatization, we aim to unravel the linguistic and doctrinal shifts between these editions of Gratian’s work.
Comments
Faculty Mentor: Paul Evans