Finance, law and the language of governmental practice in late medieval towns: Aberdeen and Augsburg in comparison

The development of towns and cities was a crucial aspect of the later middle ages, and this growth left long-lasting legacies, not least for the exercise of government in practice and for associated ideas of governance. This project addresses the problem of how to understand the languages, terminology and ideas of governmental practice in western European towns in the later middle ages. It does so through new analysis of recently created resources for the Bavarian city of Augsburg and the smaller Scottish burgh of Aberdeen.

The Aberdeen records hold UNESCO UK designation status. Preceding collaborative projects led by the co-applicants have created digital transcriptions of the textual contents of different types of urban administrative record - the mainly financial ledger books of Augsburg (1320-1466/70) and the mainly legal council registers of Aberdeen (1398-1511). The opportunity now is to place these resources in comparison and undertake deep historically driven analysis of their content, and simultaneously to develop the ways in which German and Scottish historiographies of the medieval period can benefit from more direct academic dialogue.

The examination will address the following aspects of the Augsburg and Aberdeen records: (1) what were the terminology and ideas of financial administration active in both towns; (2) what were the terminology and ideas of legal-juridical administration (again, in both towns); in both cases asking was there a shared vocabulary of governance, particularly concerning law and finance; and (3) how best to address the methodological challenge of a structured comparison of these two XML data sets. The TEI-format of both XML resources means the comparison is possible; the role of the language technician RF will be vital in applying existing tools and designing new techniques for automatic analysis to support historical enquiry, and enabling a corpus-scale examination of the relevant terminology and advancing an important field of digital humanities.

More broadly, this analysis will enable us to consider how the language of practice differs from the normative language of treatises and commentaries on government in the period, and how far 'urban' is a useful category in the analysis of medieval administrative records.