Spelling correctness as a witness of changing documentary culture in Tuscia (eighth–ninth centuries)

Abstract

This paper discusses the evolution of documentary culture in early medieval Tuscia by quantitatively examining the Latin spelling of charter scribes in relation to the following factors: time, the distinction between the formulaic and non‐formulaic parts of the document, the scribe’s domicile, the scribe’s professional status, and the document type. The paper asks what the spelling of charters tells us about administrative and socio‐cultural changes in charter production and in scribal education. The research data is 997 charters from the Late Latin Charter Treebank, and the approach that of philological corpus linguistics.