The Social Life of Early Medieval Normative Texts

SOLEMNE studies how ideas about social norms, expressed in works of canon law, spread throughout medieval Western Europe, using an innovative digital tool to analyse the transmission of combinations of authoritative statements in canonical collections.Canonical collections are in essence compendia of rearranged authoritative statements (canones) drawn from a large body of authoritative texts.

As a genre that intersects with every aspect of medieval life and society [Rennie, 2008], works of canon law, in varying degrees of sophistication, survive in a vast number of medieval manuscripts and address not only religious concerns, but also social, moral, political, and economic issues.

SOLEMNE is built on the premise that it is through the (re)arrangement of authoritative statements that medieval scholars articulated the changing medieval attitudes about social norms and societal ideals.SOLEMNE aims to be the first large-scale analysis of this dynamic process of appropriation and reorganisation of authoritative statements by developing a unique database and digital tool designed to identify and map the transmission of combinations of textual elements.

Building on this innovative database, SOLEMNE will study three central phenomena: the medieval negotiation of canonical authority throughout the Middle Ages (approx. 500-1200 CE) to address individual objectives and specific contexts; the compositional strategies to communicate social norms and ideals; and the transmission of ideas through canon law.In addition to the well-known grand collections, SOLEMNE includes mostly overlooked canonical florilegia in its analysis, expanding the breadth of canonical studies.

Through its open access online presence, SOLEMNE addresses the issue of the inaccessibility of canonical sources, while its interdisciplinary methodology offers a wide applicability in the study of legal, social, political, and intellectual history.