Category: News (Page 1 of 2)

Call for Papers IMC Leeds 2027

6 August 2026 / Bruno Schalekamp

The SOLEMNE team invites scholars to present their research in our upcoming series of sessions at the International Medieval Conference in Leeds next year! The official CfP document is available below.

We aim to explore how norms were developed, reinforced, and established across various medieval textual and non-textual genres. Papers may focus on manuscript-based and legal sources from, among others, canon law, penitentials, and capitularies. Contributions from scholars working with (historical) narrative, visual, and artistic materials are also welcome. Submissions from the field of Digital Humanities that address methodological issues related to the study of early medieval norms are particularly encouraged.

If you’re interested, please email your abstract (max. 300 words) and a provisional title, along with a brief biography that includes your institutional affiliation, department, and email address to Bruno Schalekamp (Raboud University; bruno.schalekamp@ru.nl). Any questions may also be directed to that same address. The deadline is the 31st of August, 2026.

SOLEMNE-CfP-IMC_2027-V1

SOLEMNE in Leeds

17 July 2026 / Sven Meeder

At this year’s International Medieval Congress in Leeds, SOLEMNE team members presented their research across multiple sessions. In session 1233, Friederike’s paper (“‘Guilty of three crimes’: Redefining Social Norms around Abortion in Early Medieval Canonical Collections?”) demonstrated how abortion carried many overlapping associations in early medieval texts, and how judicious editing by medieval canonists produced different contextualisations of the subject at both the textual and manuscript level. In session 1026, Bruno explored the intertextuality between penitentials and canonical collections in “The Fusion of Canon Law and Penitentials: Insights from the Dacheriana, De paenitentia, and Quadripartitus“. In session 806, Gideon sought to establish a timeline of the available evidence and the manuscripts related to the Sirmondian Constitutions in his paper “An Attempted Timeline for the Sirmondian Constitutions and Their Manuscripts”. In session 508 (held in memory of Jinty Nelson), Jan explored the early life of Louis the Pious, asking what we can learn about the young Louis that might shed light on the man he became. Finally, Gleb presented work undertaken with Lucie Doležalová (Univerzita Karlova, Prague) on the increasing visual complexity and compositional sophistication of book production in fifteenth-century Bohemia, in their paper “Mapping Visual Complexity in 15th-Century Manuscript Page Layouts.”

The sessions were all recorded and can be (re)viewed by those registered at https://imc-leeds.confex.com/imc/2026/meetingapp.cgi/Home/0.

For the IMC 2027, SOLEMNE is planning to organise a number of sessions reflecting on the theme of social history and early medieval normative texts. If you are interested in participating, please do not hesitate to get in touch!

Excerpt (7.10-7.11) from a 6th-century manuscript of books 6-8 of the Codex Theodosianus.

Publication Gideon: ‘Did Arcadius legislate on episcopalis audientia?’

13 July 2026 / Sven Meeder

In the shadow of the 2026 International Medieval Congress at Leeds, Gideon’s latest article was published in The Legal History Review (a.k.a. Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschiedenis / Revue d’histoire du droit). It is a rare example of an essay about a crucial step in any research process: assessing the background of received wisdom. In this case, the assumption is that the text of CJ 1,4,7, a law on episcopal adjudication, was issued by Arcadius as part of a larger legislative action on the 27th of July AD 398 at Mnizus. Gideon’s article establishes that this is exactly that: an assumption. Through an exploration of the (lacking) manuscript evidence and earlier humanist editions of the Code, notably that of Gregorius Haloander, this article stresses both the place Mnizus and promulgation by Arcadius are in fact assumptions, without extant direct evidence. Similarly, Krüger’s claim that CJ 1,4,7 was also part of the Theodosian Code lacks direct evidence. It is a welcome reminder to all working with historical evidence mediated through (much) older scholarship.

Gideon de Jong, ‘Did Arcadius legislate on episcopalis audientia? And was that legislation included in the Theodosian Code?’, Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschiedenis / Revue d’histoire du droit / The Legal History Review 94(1-2) (2026), pp. 138-181. https://doi.org/10.1163/15718190-20260110

Graph displaying cosine similarity between beatitudes and the data in our canon law corpus

SOLEMNE at DH-Benelux

6 June 2026 / Sven Meeder

Friederike, Gleb, and Sven presented their study into the values of the ‘beatitudes’ in our canon law corpus at the DH-Benelux conference in Maastricht. Deploying methods inspired by topic modelling, their paper presents early results of a study exploring the dynamics of Christianisation and social justice in early medieval canon law. It investigates the hypothesis that, between the fourth century, when Christianity was established as the official religion of the Roman Empire, and the end of the Carolingian era in the tenth century, the values expressed in legal discourse became progressively Christianised, as evident in an increasing focus on care for poor and vulnerable groups. We aim to investigate the prevalence of the semantic field related to social justice as well as its shifting components across early medieval canon law. A preliminary version of the paper is accessible on Zenodo:

Friederike Voit, Gleb Schmidt, and Sven Meeder. ‘”Blessed Are the Poor”: Modelling Christian Values in Early Medieval Canon Law (400–1100)’. Presented at the DH Benelux 2026, Maastricht, Netherlands, 17 April 2026. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19632500.

Opening of the Sortes Sanctorum on fol. 157v (fragment) of St John's College MS 17. © The President and Fellows of St John's College, Oxford

Publication Bruno: ‘These Lots Never Deceive’

19 May 2026 / Sven Meeder

Building on the research done for his ReMA thesis, SOLEMNE’s Bruno Schalekamp just published his study of the so-called Sortes Sanctorum, a prognostic and divinatory text known as “lots of the saints”. It circulated widely in numerous medieval Latin manuscripts dating from the early ninth to the fifteenth centuries, as a companion to many different texts: from schoolbooks, to biblical glossaries, and from encyclopedias to treatises on computus (and canon law, sometimes!). Bruno argues that this work appealed to a broader and more engaged readership than previously recognised. Using newly identified manuscript evidence from the ninth to twelfth centuries, he demonstrates that the text could adapt to different intellectual settings of the early and high Middle Ages, transitioning from marginalia to an integral component of main texts. In this expansive Open Access article, Bruno pays close attention to the placement of the text in codices and to the text’s transmission history, revealing the sociocultural significance of prognostic texts such as the Sortes Sanctorum within the context of medieval knowledge systems.

Bruno Schalekamp, ‘“These Lots Never Deceive”: Compiling and Reading the Latin Manuscripts of the Sortes sanctorum’, Manuscript Studies: A Journal of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies 11.1 (2026), pp. 36-101. (https://doi.org/10.1353/mns.2026.a990232)

Publication Gideon: ‘Law is Said in Many Ways’

12 May 2026 / Sven Meeder

Gideon de Jong (team member of both SOLEMNE and Anchoring Innovation) has just published an article, tackling one of the most vexing questions of historical research into canon law: is canon law ‘law’? Harnessing his legal knowledge and historical skills, Gideon studies the Irish Collectio canonum Hibernensis, which is generally called canon law and which itself (in some manuscripts) includes a theoretical reflection on the definition of law. Scholars have questioned the extent to which early medieval canon law, and specifically this collection, conforms to law in a meaningful sense. Inspired by H. L. A. Hart’s concept of law, seminal in contemporary legal theory, Gideon’s article argues that laws can be understood only from a participant perspective or ‘internal point of view’. The way the words ius, lex, and canon are used throughout the collection points to the presence of this perspective. The article thus makes the case for treating the Hibernensis as canon law.

Thanks to funding from Anchoring Innovation, the article in Peritia is fully Open Access and can be found here.

Gideon de Jong, ‘”Law is Said in Many Ways”: An Attempt at Conceptual Clarification of Canon Law in the Collectio canonum Hibernensis’, Peritia 36 (2025), 71-97. https://doi.org/10.1484/J.PERIT.5.153301

The main entrance of the Austrian Academy of Sciences at the Georg-Coch-Platz 2

Workshop: Ruse of reuse. Detecting text-similarity with AI in historical sources

23 January 2026 / Sven Meeder

The SOLEMNE project is co-organising this workshop on text-reuse detection to be held at the Austrian Academy of Sciences on 5-6 March 2026.

The amount of texts available in various corpora, thanks to the many ongoing digitalisation projects, has increased immensely, and the success of HTR will only increase the amount of available texts. This means that the need to take advantage of this amount of text only increases. The ability to identify text-reuse and measure text similarity is thus more important than ever, and promises to see connections never viewed before. AI promises to make this possible.
This two-day small workshop is a continuation of the event held in 2023: Finding Connections: Using AI and DNA Sequencing to Find Similarities and Parallels in Medieval Texts, with an extended focus on general historical sources.
March 5th will be devoted to presentations of research in two sessions. In the afternoon, there will be an associated KIMAFO by William Mattingly, open to the general audience.
March 6th will be more informal and truly of a workshop nature. Two morning sessions will be devoted to work-in-progress reports, plans for the implementation of AI in various projects, experimental approaches to the problem, and discussions. In the afternoon, there will be a practical workshop focusing on the use of various AI approaches. This will be led by Martin Roček and Gleb Schmidt.

Published: “Biblicality” of Early Medieval Canon Law

22 December 2025 / Sven Meeder / 0 Comments

Using language modeling and the information-theoretic concept of perplexity, Friederike, Gleb, and Sven explore the influence of the Bible on early medieval canon law. We demonstrate that calculating perplexity of a corpus of canon law under a language model trained exclusively on Scripture can serve as a reliable proxy for accessing the overall linguistic similarity—stylistic, semantic, and syntactic—of canon law to the Bible. Our paper, presented at the conference on Computational Humanities Research 2025 (Luxembourg), presents the measured “biblicality” of various canon law texts, explores its chronological development, and delves into the linguistic and stylistic meaning of higher or lower “biblicality” by observing correlations between perplexity under the biblical language model and various linguistic features of canon law texts, which can be extracted from rich morpho-styntactic annotation. We hypothesise that changes in the levels of “biblicality”, clearly observable across the chronological subdivisions of the corpus, suggest that the imitation of scriptural language may have been a deliberate strategy reflecting evolving views on the role and place of Scripture in legislation. Further research is needed to trace in more detail the connection between the authoritative status of canon law collections and the use of the Bible.

The ‘Maison du Savoir’ of the University of Luxembourg, venue of CHR 2025

SOLEMNE in Oslo

17 November 2025 / Sven Meeder / 0 Comments

In the words of Kriston Rennie, canon law is a genre that intersects ‘with every aspect of medieval life and society’. This is illustrated by the fact that canonical works, in all their shapes and sizes, are often found in manuscripts that contain a variety of different texts. A study into the canonical tract, known as De ratione matrimonii (On the Nature of Marriage), led the SOLEMNE team to Vatican, Pal. lat. 973, a ‘multi-text manuscript’ in optima forma. Here, this normative text mingles with a plethora of other works, including several minuscule texts, which – despite being contextually extraneous – provide context and nuance to the medieval reception of canon law. This November, Sven was invited by Prof. Ildar Garipzanov and the MINiTEXTS project to present some of our findings in Oslo. This presented a wonderful opportunity to learn more about the important work done by the MINiTEXTS project members.

Last folio of the manuscript Vatican, Pal. lat. 973

Published: Collectio CCCC capitulorum, The Collection in 400 Chapters

13 August 2025 / Sven Meeder / 0 Comments

The cover of the published edition of the Collectio CCCC capitulorum The work on this edition started long before the SOLEMNE project saw the light, but since the text under consideration (the ‘Collection in 400 chapters‘) is relevant to the project, its publication after many years deserves mention here.

Although the Collectio 400 capitulorum is a so-called systematic collection, eminent scholars of canon law commented on its lack of structure. Even ‘with the best will in the world’, the collection’s system eluded them. Despite its flaws, however, there is evidence that the collection gained some popularity in the ninth century, apparently providing the basis for the Poenitentiale Martenianum, directly or indirectly influencing Hrabanus Maurus and Benedictus Levita. The ninth-century appreciation is understandable, for, as one of the many products of the vigorous canonical activity of the eighth and ninth centuries, the Collectio 400 capitulorum impresses in its handling of the canonical material as well as the breadth of sources and the topics covered.

This book constitutes the first in-depth study of this intriguing canonical collection, with a detailed description of the extant manuscript witnesses, its sources, and its influence. The critical edition offers scholars of the early Middle Ages in general and canon law in particular access to an instructive, if unpolished, product of Carolingian legal thought.

The book has now materialised (both as an actual book and an ebook) and is available for order on the website of the Catholic University of America Press, and at your local bookstore.