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

Informazioni relative al progetto

AntCoCo

ID dell’accordo di sovvenzione: 101001991

DOI

10.3030/101001991

Data della firma CE 17 Dicembre 2020

Data di avvio 1 Maggio 2021

Data di completamento 31 Agosto 2026

Finanziato da

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Costo totale

€ 1 998 625,00

Contributo UE

€ 1 998 625,00

Coordinato da

OTTO-FRIEDRICH-UNIVERSITAET BAMBERG
Germany

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

Periodo di rendicontazione: 2024-05-01 al 2025-10-31

Sintesi del contesto e degli obiettivi generali del progetto

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.

Lavoro eseguito dall’inizio del progetto fino alla fine del periodo coperto dalla relazione e principali risultati finora ottenuti

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.

Progressi oltre lo stato dell’arte e potenziale impatto previsto (incluso l’impatto socioeconomico e le implicazioni sociali più ampie del progetto fino ad ora)

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?

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