In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Carolingian Canon Law Project Dir. by Abigail Firey
  • Melodie H. Eichbauer
Carolingian Canon Law Project Dir. by Abigail Firey. University of Kentucky, 2006–. <http://ccl.rch.uky.edu/>

According to its Home page, “The Carolingian Canon Law project is a searchable, electronic rendition of works of canon law used by Carolingian readers.” A number of grants and contributors support the CCL: NEH Digital Humanities Start-up Grant (Level 2), ACLS Digital Humanities Innovation Fellowship, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Kentucky, the Graduate School at the University of Kentucky, and Research for Computing in the Humanities. The project aims to map the extent to which texts varied in the manuscript tradition, to identify particular points of variation, and to clarify their transmission. The project also provides historical and bibliographic annotation of canons used by jurists before, during, and after the Carolingian period. The Home page lists the compatible browsers as Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera.

The links on the left of the site allow the user to easily navigate the project’s components. The Contents link includes a variety of features. The user can search the Latin corpus via four different options. The basic option is a simple keyword search. The advanced option allows the user to combine or exclude words, or to search for a phrase. The freeform option allows for complex searches that support “not,” “or,” “and,” field names, and parentheses. The browse option alphabetically lists the works along with manuscript information and folio numbers, thereby allowing the user to compare the same text in different manuscripts. Transcriptions, the second link under Contents, allows the user to access transcriptions of canons organized by collection and manuscript. The last two links under Contents—Conceptual Corpus, and Annotations and Translations—take the user to the same location. This feature allows the user to filter by title, Latin text, translation keyword, annotation key word, or shelfmark. The user can also scroll through pages of texts that list title, Latin text, translation (if available), annotations (if available), the locus, shelf mark, and siglum. Essentially this section contains “every canon from every manuscript of every collection in the CCL.”

The Resources link opens with what I imagine is the first sentence said each fall by Abigail Firey to new graduate students: “One is not born knowing how to study medieval canon law.” This section is devoted to articles, images, and bibliographic information pertaining to particular canons, texts, collections, manuscripts, and legal concepts. [End Page 165] The Links section provides references to other legal history websites and is very useful. For instance, there are links to primary sources, such as: Projekt Pseudoisidor, Ivo of Chartres, the Corpus iuris canonici (1582) with glosses (UCLA Digital Collections), the Corpus iuris civilis, and the Magna Carta at the British Library. Links to research tools include, for example: Clavis Canonum, Forum historiae iuris, Bibliographia iuris synodalis antiqui, and to Roman Law resources edited by Ernest Metzger at the University of Glasgow. Finally the site provides links to the sites of legal scholars and institutions, such as Kenneth Pennington, Institut für Deutsche und Rheinische Rechtsgeschichte der Universität Bonn, Leopold Wenger Institut für Rechtsgeschichte, and the Max-Planck-Institut für europäische Rechtsgeschichte. Individuals are encouraged to contribute bibliographic information and the Advisory Board will also consider articles for publication on the site.

The Workspaces link is quite literally the heart of the project. While Abigail Firey is the project director, and Gerhard Schmitz (Monumenta Germaniae Historica), Daniel Ziemann (University of Cologne), and Michael D. Elliot (University of Toronto) are listed as participants, the scholarly community is the pulse of the project. The translations of texts, annotations of textual variations, and contributions to the Resources link are all made possible by the contributions of others. As such Workspaces hosts individual, password-protected sites on which scholars can store their work. Scholars can use the workspace to import copies of their transcriptions using T-PEN (Transcription for Paleographical and Editorial Notation)—which records the transcriber’s name and date of transcription—via the Transcribe link. They can revise and reassemble the texts however they choose and then...

pdf

Share