Do Manuscripts Burn? Royal Diplomas in Late Pre Norman England 871–1066
Channel: Denis Sukhino-Khomenko
Date: 2023-05-15

Recording of my presentation at the 58th International Congress on Medieval Studies (May 11–13th, organised by Western Michigan University) at the panel "Digitizing the Middle Ages: The Impacts of Digitized Corpora on Medieval Historiography". At this time, I presented my research article ‘Do Manuscripts Burn? The Representativeness of the Corpus of Royal Diplomas of Late pre-Norman England (871–1066): Opening a Discussion’, Graphosphaera: Writing and Written Practices, 2/1 (2022), 175–286 (http://writing.igh.ru/index.php?id=2022-2-1-175-286 and https://www.academia.edu/98954753/Do_Manuscripts_Burn_The_Representativeness_of_the_Corpus_of_Royal_Diplomas_of_Late_pre_Norman_England_871_1066_Opening_a_Discussion).
The presentation addressed the problem of the geographical and chronological representativeness of the surviving corpus of English pre-Norman royal diplomas of 871–1066 AD. My research spotlights a peculiarly pronounced correlation between the ethno-political division of Lowland Britain into the “Danelaw” and “Greater Wessex”, as well as between the sum total of charters for a given region and the number of archives in it. Next I broached the subject of whether the archival and chronological distribution of the extant royal acta can be considered objective. When put together, indirect evidence tips the balance in favour of the corpus’ at least relative chronological and geographical representativeness, even if the said losses distorted it to a lesser or greater degree.