Fluid texts and scholars’ digests: (re)production of law in medieval Ireland

FLEXI investigates how the fluid, multifarious law texts were (re)produced and accepted as sources of law in medieval Europe, using four sets of late medieval Irish law texts called the digests as its main object of study.

The digests contain texts quoted from diverse sources, and organise them into a systematic review of the legal tradition.

They represent the law in operation in the form of highly variegated and complex intertextual networks, and therefore are an ideal sample for studying the dynamics between fluidity and unity in medieval law texts. FLEXI focuses on how law texts were (re)produced, studied, and transmitted in medieval Ireland.

It is not only the first in-depth study of the Irish digests, but also a ground-breaking attempt to synthesise philology, comparative legal history, network theories, and digital techniques to revolutionise the research of medieval law texts.FLEXI traces and measures the sources used in these digests quantitatively, using linked data model and network analysis to reveal their compilatory principles and text reuse patterns.

This is an innovative approach to probe the intellectual universe of the jurists.

It evaluates the variation within the digests and examines the interpretative techniques by which the jurists justified and harmonised the variation.

FLEXI also looks for possible influences from other legal traditions such as the Canon Law and the Civil Law on the compilatory principles of the digests, and makes comparison with medieval Welsh law on how inherited materials were treated and updated in Ireland and Wales.

Finally, FLEXI tests and develops software for automated detection of parallel texts (text reuse) for early Irish texts.

The toolkit and software developed by FLEXI will offer a long-needed digital solution to the processing of early Irish texts, because it can quickly identify similar texts from the vast corpus of Irish materials, thus revealing intertextual relationships hidden from the human eye.