Roman and Justinianic Legal Terminology in Central European Charter Corpora: A Computational Approach to Medieval Charter Corpora

Abstract

The reception of Justinianic Roman law into medieval documentary practice has been studied for over a century, yet the concrete pathways by which the terminology of the Corpus Iuris Civilis entered everyday charters remain insufficiently understood at scale. This article presents a computational framework for detecting Justinianic legal formulas across large charter corpora and applies it to thirteenth-century Central European material retrieved from the Monasterium.net repository, spanning forty-five archival collections. The method combines three components engineered for the orthographic and structural variability of medieval Latin: a self-learning adaptive alphabet that derives normalization rules from the data; a data-driven subword vocabulary whose size is fixed by the morphological profile of the corpus; and a leave-n-out n-gram engine, reduced to integer comparison through polynomial hashing, that tolerates scribal insertions and substitutions while remaining tractable across hundreds of thousands of documents. The analysis confirms a pronounced thirteenth-century peak dominated by the Digesta, and yields two findings that qualitative scholarship could only hypothesize: institutional type differentiates reception far more strongly than geography, and adoption was temporally staggered rather than synchronous, with institutional peaks separated by up to two and a half centuries. At the level of individual phrases, the corpus provides verbatim evidence of textual transmission, including a documentary occurrence of the Digna Vox. We argue that the principal contribution is a reproducible, language-agnostic instrument that directs, rather than replaces, philological close reading.