The research project "The Origins of the European Vernacular Law: Texts, Words, Ideas (9th-13th centuries)" aims to become the first European laboratory for a systematic and interdisciplinary investigation on the genesis of medieval vernacular law, of its lexicon and its textual circulation. The research focuses on the development of the Romance juridical lexicon and its relationship with the European juridical culture in the medieval Romance area. The purpose of this study is to create a pan-Romance survey of juridical texts (also related to the Germanic early medieval juridical tradition) in order to look into the development of the vernacular juridical lexicon in its connections with Latin tradition. The examples of "vernacular law" collected in this research include sources such as the Anglo-Norman legislation, the Castilian "Siete Partidas", the Catalan "Usatges", the Occitan "Codi", the Italian municipal statutes and the wide manuscript tradition, still largely unpublished, of the Old French translations of the "Corpus iuris civilis" (13th century). The main outcome resulting from the analysis of the vernacular juridical lexicon will be the creation of an historical onomasiological vocabulary: the "Romance Juridical Lexicon". This research project will enable the understanding of those linguistic and juridical "isoglosses" which constitute the premonitory signs of the "European common space".
In the light of its subject of study, the project "The Origins of the European Vernacular Law" will contribute, on the one hand, to the innovation of scientific research in the identified disciplinary areas and, on the other hand, given its cultural rootedness in an European historical epistemology, it will also contribute to the progressive public establishment of the "European historical memory".
1. Innovative potential: the contribution to scientific research
The interdisciplinary dimension (philological, linguistic, historical-juridical), the pan-Romance perspective and the extensive textual "corpus" involved in the investigation make the present research a high risk/high gain scientific project. The variety of the scientific competences required for its development, as well as the multiplicity of the linguistic and textual traditions involved in the research, represent an element of stimulating methodological complexity. Such a project will manage to improve its elements of complexity (high risk), turning them into precise scientific long-term acquisitions (high gain), only within a financing and scientific organization program such as the "Progetti di Ricerca Grandi". The innovative potential resulting from the research project involves several areas of its development.
a) Methodological innovations. From a methodological point of view, the research will be an example of synergy and scientific sharing in the Humanities area. It is indeed based on the structural interdisciplinary collaboration between philologists of Romance and Latin traditions, historians and historians of medieval law and political institutions. As well as representing the formal structure of the research team, this methodological perspective will lead to the definition and testing of a new disciplinary field: the systematic collaboration between the different disciplinary competences will be able to redefine, on new textual and methodological bases, previous and unsolved issues, both philological and historiographical.
b) Process innovations. The binomial law-vernacular has been an essential historiographical device since the origins of Romance Philology: some of the oldest vernacular texts are indeed an expression of juridical discourse (ex. "Serments de Strasbourg"). The proposed research, aware of the historical significance of the binomial law-vernacular, sets as its aim to develop its process from a pan-Romance and diachronic point of view. In this respect, vernacular juridical text will be not handled as a fragment of a particular historical identity anymore, but rather as an element of a wider European juridical-linguistic cartography.
c) Product innovations. The interdisciplinary and pan-Romance dimension will allow the project to enter a "synthetic" phase of the scientific research. The "Romance Juridical Lexicon" turns out to be an outcome, which can synthetize the different analytical phases of the investigation according to a coherent chronological and geographical unity. Moreover, the "Romance Juridical Lexicon" is a completely new scientific outcome in the field of philological studies, since up to now nobody has carried out systematic pan-Romance researches on medieval juridical lexicon.
2. The contribution to public debate
The research project "The Origins of the European Vernacular Law" will contribute to the study of the diachronic and diatopic "continuity/discontinuity" of European cultural space. In this respect, it assumes European historical-cultural unity as an epistemological framework of reference. The results of the research will contribute to the progressive creation of a "European common memory" and the historical awareness of "European citizenship". Moreover, this project intersects a new relevant field of interest for the contemporary European institutions: the translatability of juridical national languages within the legislation of the European Community (for example: https://e-justice.europa.eu/content_glossaries_and_terminology-119-en.do), namely the possibility of harmonizing the terminology and the juridical lexicon of the European Countries. In this perspective, "The Origins of the European Vernaculars Law" will offer the historical and philological basis to explore the current development of the European juridical language.