Dauvit Broun

Models of Authority: Scottish Charters and the Emergence of Government is a resource for the study of the contents, script and physical appearance of the corpus of Scottish royal charters which survives from 1100–1250. Through close examination of the diplomatic and palaeographic features of the charters, the project will explore the evidence for developments in the perception of royal government during a crucial period in Scottish history.

The DigiPal project for palaeography has featured in previous DH conferences. It includes a generalised framework for the description and analysis of handwriting, initially applied to Old English of the eleventh century but subsequently extended to Latin, Hebrew, and decoration; it incorporates a novel model for describing handwriting; and a recent addition allows the embedding of linked palaeographical images into prose description. The purpose of this poster is to present new developments which form part of two further major grants, one of which is the Models of Authority project. Specifically, the focus here is on the incorporation of textual content into the model for handwriting.

This is a database of all known people of Scotland between 1093 and 1314 mentioned in over 8600 contemporary documents. The database contains all information that can be assembled about every individual involved in actions in Scotland or relating to Scotland in documents written between the death of Malcolm III on 13 November 1093 and Robert I’s parliament at Cambuskenneth on 6 November 1314. The database is not simply a list of everyone who is ever mentioned. It is designed to reflect the interactions and relationships between people as this is represented in the documents. The database draws on over 8600 documents from this period that are directed by one or more individuals to others (either by name or in general terms). This allows the database to be structured according to the formal aspects of these documents, giving it the potential to be used not only a source of information, but also as a means of investigating the ways in which social relationships were mediated by the doc...

When we think of genealogies in medieval Scotland our minds might turn at once to Gaelic, the Celtic language that was spoken in the Middle Ages from the southern tip of Ireland to the northernmost coast of Scotland. This is not unnatural. Texts that trace the ancestry of a notable individual generation by generation survive in their hundreds from the medieval Gaelic world. They are found today almost exclusively in late-medieval Irish manuscripts. Some genealogies originated in collections made as early as the tenth century. Presumably there were once many Scottish manuscripts containing genealogies, too. A reason why they would not have survived is that, in the Scottish kingdom during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Gaelic learned orders who would have had a primary interest in writing and copying this material declined in significance and ceased to participate in Gaelic literate culture. This chapter will open with a brief survey of medieval genealogical texts relating ...

This paper describes several aspects of a formal digital semantic model that expresses some issues presented by medieval charters. Surprisingly, perhaps, this model does not deal directly with a charter's text and is not mark-up based. Instead, it draws on the authors’ experience with the construction of three highly structured factoid-oriented prosopographical databases that drew heavily on charter sources, and that also did not explicitly contain a digital representation of the charter texts. The paper explains the way in which the structured data model thus derived differs from text-oriented approaches such as TEI/CEI work that has been done so far on charters. It presents a view on why this factoid-based model seems to capture more readily some of the complexity in the apparent meanings of the charters, and suggests that this is because it is also more likely to relate to a richer conception of the broader medieval world in which these charters were created than text-oriente...