Understanding Late Antique Top-Down Communication: a Study of Imperial Constitutions

Informations projet

AntCoCo

N° de convention de subvention: 101001991

DOI

10.3030/101001991

Date de signature de la CE 17 Decembre 2020

Date de début 1 Mai 2021

Date de fin 31 Août 2026

Financé au titre de

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Coût total

€ 1 998 625,00

Contribution de l’UE

€ 1 998 625,00

Coordonné par

OTTO-FRIEDRICH-UNIVERSITAET BAMBERG
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - AntCoCo (Understanding Late Antique Top-Down Communication: a Study of Imperial Constitutions)

Période du rapport: 2024-05-01 au 2025-10-31

Résumé du contexte et des objectifs généraux du projet

Late antique laws (constitutions) are composed in a challenging, rarefied prose, hiding their legal core in the thick of a rambling text. In a world devoid of television or newspapers, the freshly arriving constitutions arguably provided the most important connection to the wider world. One might expect their expansive introductions to be propagandistic, which is however not the case: several emperors preferred a candid approach, admitting that barbarian attacks were indeed to be feared or that an earlier law was wrong. The EU-funded ERC project AntCoCo will investigate these constitutions from various viewpoints. The texts will be scrutinized by linguists, historians, and legal historians. Modern communication theory will provide the methodological means for an understanding of their communicative function.

Travail effectué depuis le début du projet jusqu’à la fin de la période considérée dans le rapport et principaux résultats atteints jusqu’à présent

The IT aspect of this project has reached its completion. The application providing computer-supported analysis of the late antique prose rhythm resulting in a heatmap is launched. Furthermore, Amanuensis V6, the major update which includes the full Heumann-Seckel is also concluded and launched.
The previously unsatisfactorily edited full constitutions were collected and editions created, the publication of the relevant articles is now ongoing. This includes the hitherto unknown constitution discovered by Lorenzo Livorsi. The collection of testimonia of lost constitutions was widened to include testimonia in other laws and in Church historians. The survey of prefaces of constitutions in view to their communicative function has made much progress and will partly be published during the upcoming months.

Progrès au-delà de l’état des connaissances et impact potentiel prévu (y compris l’impact socio-économique et les conséquences sociétales plus larges du projet jusqu’à présent)

In the following areas, the project will yield significant progress beyond the state-of-the-art:
There is no decent edition of the full constitutions. This lack of a serious edition explains why the evidence from the full constitutions is so little used. This ERC project will create a comprehensive edition with translation and commentary of the full constitutions from Late Antiquity.
Available translations of late antique full constitutions and law codes are quite often just as difficult to understand as the Latin originals themselves. Apparently, translators could not grasp the meaning of the source language and therefore chose to render the contents »literally« (which here results in »wrongly«, as the underlying idea is not transported into the target language by rendering it according to such a crude approach). Publications on the grammar and vocabulary of the full constitutions will facilitate their understanding.
Legislation until the third century exclusively happened in Latin, whereas at some point during the reign of Justinian Greek finally prevailed. In between, the situation was flexible and remains for now unclear. We have a small sample of constitutions in both Latin and Greek. Both versions are idiomatic, meaning that it is not easy to ascertain which version is the original. Hence, this will give us great insight into late antique translation techniques.
So far, work on the full constitutions in their communicative function is unsatisfactory. For many reasons, their content cannot be regarded as “propaganda,” except if we apply a simplistic definition of propaganda. Hence, in which way were they actually used?

A Manuscript of the Post-Theodosian Novels