Delegated Jurisdiction on the Iberian Peninsula

The project, funded by the German Research Foundation and carried out in cooperation between the Chair of Digital Humanities at the University of Passau and the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities, analysed the practice and spread of papally delegated jurisdiction on the Iberian Peninsula in the twelfth century. In recent years, significant progress has been made in the scholarly editing of sources for this region within the framework of the completed academies project Papsturkunden des frühen und hohen Mittelalters (“Papal Charters of the Early and High Middle Ages”). These advances allowed a large-scale study of this judicial practice against the background of the increasing juridification of ecclesiastical life.

The project applied approaches and methods from digital history. It focused, on the one hand, on the analysis of networks of actors using the methods of historical network research, and on the other hand, on the process by which documentary formularies became consolidated in papal judicial letters through the application of text-mining techniques.

The source base consisted of around 1,250 charters, complemented by metadata from the edited volumes Papsturkunden in Spanien I–III and Papsturkunden in Portugal, as well as from the forthcoming volume Papsturkunden in Spanien IV on the Kingdom of León and the Spanish military orders. This volume was likewise prepared within the framework of the project and is an important contribution to completing the subproject Iberia Pontificia of the Göttingen papal charters project.

Further information can be found on the website of the project partner, the University of Passau.

Project Team

Project Directors: 
Prof. Dr. Klaus Herbers (Senior Professor, Chair of Medieval History, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen–Nuremberg) | Prof. Dr. Malte Rehbein (Chair of Digital Humanities, University of Passau)

Research Staff: 
Dr. Daniel Berger (Göttingen) | Dr. Bengt Büttner (Göttingen) | Tobias Doppler (Passau) | Alina Ostrowski (Passau) | Carolin Pilz (Göttingen)