Models of authority: Scottish charters and the emergence of government 1100-1250

这个项目是关于政府及其在中世纪产生和发展的方式。我们今天所认为的政府，最早是在12世纪的西欧得到承认的。但这是王室权力和权威增加的自然结果，还是国王对混乱的反应？理解中世纪政府的出现必须建立在理解证据的主要来源--宪章--的基础上，而正是在12世纪，宪章开始大量存在。这个项目的新方法是专注于理解和解释宪章最鲜明的特征--他们的笔迹外观和他们散文的公式化方面。宪章是权威的产物：其文本的内容和脚本的风格对于理解它们所体现的权威具有重要意义。但宪章不仅是权威的艺术品，它们也是权威的典范。如果我们想要考察政府的出现和王权在其发展中的作用，那么看看皇家宪章如何成为非皇室宪章的典范是很重要的。特许状的笔迹和散文是一个巨大的未开发资源，可以追踪王权作为与政府发展有关的社会权威来源的日益增长的形象。如果认为这只是一个“自上而下”的过程，那就错了。抄写员的工作通常以笔迹和散文风格为指导。在这一时期之初，宪章的撰写方式有很大的不同。后来，非皇室抄写员越来越多地选择追随皇家抄写员不断演变和日益创新的风格。在苏格兰，这并不是因为皇家行政部门发展迅速：与英格兰不同，皇家官僚机构是有限的。相反，这是因为皇家宪章被非皇室抄写员采纳为权威的典范。这方面以前从未被研究过，无论是在苏格兰还是在其他地方。它为研究政府的出现提供了一种新的方法，可以让我们从非皇室文字的角度来看待这一过程。大量苏格兰原始宪章的数字图像将作为我们的案例研究。苏格兰最适合作为案例研究，因为它拥有无与伦比的数字图像语料库，这些图像来自一系列中世纪档案。这是一个足够小的语料库，足以管理，但足够大的语料库，可以对笔迹和散文进行分析，从而得出重要的结果。这样的研究现在成为可能，因为合作伙伴彼得·斯托克斯在DigiPal项目中开创了新的工具，用于对中世纪笔迹进行数字分析。DigiPal有一个分析早期中世纪英语书法的在线框架，通过将部分手写图像与关于文本、上下文和手写本身的结构化信息联系起来。《权威模型》将通过研究DigiPal工具如何适应与草书完全不同的环境来开辟新的天地。在草书环境中，字母形式天生就不那么稳定，而且与其他字母的联系也更差。它们不是单独分析字母形式，而是在单词和词组的上下文中进行调查。然后，我们将不仅能够确定在许多宪章中共享的细节，以及它们被使用的时间和地点，而且还能够确定它们与特定情况的关联程度。然后，我们应该能够看到政府的出现在多大程度上是通过越来越重视非王室特许中的王室模式来预测的，并调查这种情况最初发生的背景。非皇室抄写者倾向于模仿皇家抄写者的背景不太可能是苏格兰独有的。如果在皇家行政发展较晚的苏格兰，王权在宪章中被视为典范的形象可能会增长，那么我们可以问，其他地方的政府的出现是否可能是自下而上的，甚至更多的，而不是自上而下的。

This project is about government and the way it emerged and developed in the middle ages. Government as we would think of it today can first be recognised in western Europe during the twelfth century. But was it the natural result of increasing royal power and authority; or was it a response of kings to disorder? Understanding the emergence of medieval government has to be based on understanding the main source of evidence - charters - and it is in the twelfth century that charters begin to survive in large numbers. This project's new approach is to focus on understanding and interpreting the most distinctive features of charters -the appearance of their handwriting and the formulaic aspects of their prose. Charters are artefacts of authority: the content of their text and the style of their script is significant for understanding the authority they embody. But charters are not only artefacts of authority; they acted as models of authority too. Seeing how royal charters served as models for non-royal ones is important if we want to examine the emergence of government and the role of kingship in its development. The handwriting and prose of charters are a huge untapped resource for tracking the increasing profile of kingship as a source of social authority in relation to the growth of government. It would be a mistake to assume that this was simply a 'top down' process. Scribes were usually guided in their work by styles of handwriting and prose. At the beginning of this period there was a lot of variation in how charters were written. Later, non-royal scribes chose more and more to follow the evolving and increasingly innovative style of royal scribes. In Scotland this was not because royal administration was growing rapidly: unlike England, royal bureaucracy was limited. It was, instead, because royal charters were being adopted as a model of authority by non-royal scribes. This aspect has not been investigated before, in Scotland or elsewhere. It offers a new way to investigate the emergence of government, one that can allow us to see this process from the perspective of non-royal scribes.Digital images of a large number of original charters from Scotland will act as our case-study. Scotland is best placed to be the case-study because of its unparalleled corpus of digital images of charters from a range of medieval archives. It is a corpus small enough to be manageable but large enough for the analysis of their handwriting and prose to give significant results.Such research is now possible because new tools for the digital analysis of medieval handwriting have been pioneered in the DigiPal project by Co-I Peter Stokes. DigiPal has an online framework for analysing early medieval English bookhand by linking portions of images of handwriting to structured information about the text, context, and handwriting itself. 'Models of Authority' will break fresh ground by investigating how the DigiPal tools can be adapted in the fundamentally different environment of cursive writing, where letter-forms are inherently less stable and linked to other letters. Instead of analysing letter-forms individually, they will be investigated in the context of words and groups of words. We shall then be able not only to identify details that are shared in many charters, and when and where they were used, but also to establish how far they correlate with a specific situation. We should then be able to see how far the emergence of government was anticipated by an increasing emphasis on royal models in non-royal charters, and investigate the contexts in which this first occurred.The contexts in which non-royal scribes were prone to mimicking royal scribes are unlikely to be unique to Scotland. If the profile of kingship as a model in charters could grow in Scotland, where royal administration developed late, then we can ask whether the emergence of government elsewhere might have been as much, or more, 'bottom up' than 'top down'.