Digital editing charters of S. Pietro di Tramutola and S. Maria di Orsoleo
At the beginning of the third year of my PhD (October 2025), I arrived in Graz for a research stay at the Department of Digital Humanities.
My PhD project consists of the critical edition of the earliest documents related to the Basilicata region in southern Italy preserved in the archive of the monastery of the Ss. Trinità di Cava de’ Tirreni. This corpus is formed by 100 document dating from 1083 to 1286; most of them have never been published before, and the editions of some are old and, in many cases, inaccurate. The project focuses primarily on a traditional critical edition, but it also includes a digital edition of a selection of documents from the main corpus.
The first 2-3 months at the Department of Digital Humanities in Graz provided me with the knowledge necessary for my work. During this period I became familiar with the wide range of possibilities offered by the Digital Humanities for digital editions, thanks both to the supervision of Prof. Georg Vogeler and to suggestions from the members of the ERC DiDip project. In this period I also started planning the digital edition of a small corpus of documents from my PhD project, seeking to apply concretely what I had learned.

After this phase, I worked on the documents from my PhD project. First, I selected the documents, choosing the ones coming from two monasteries: S. Pietro di Tramutola and S. Maria di Orsoleo, for a total of 30 charters. These were chosen not only because they are representative of the documentary production of the Basilicata region, but also because they show two typical situations in medieval charter collections. The documents from S. Pietro di Tramutola (1135-1190) were of particular importance in later centuries (15th-16th) for the monastery of the Ss. Trinità di Cava – now preserving the documents – in its attempts to recover lost possessions in the region. The documents from S. Maria di Orsoleo (1192-1286) represent another frequent situation: the difficulty of clearly reconstructing the ‘movements’ of documents between different archives. Why are these documents preserved in the archive of the Ss. Trinità di Cava? Was there a relationship of dependency between the two monasteries? But there is also a more practical reason for this selection: these two groups of documents have an optimal chronological distribution, allowing for a deeper analysis of several internal features.
For the mark-up of the edition I’ve used as a model the digital edition of the documents of S. Maria della Grotta. This model was chosen because it appears to be one of the most reliable digital editions of south-Italian charters, offering solutions to similar problems. However, this work was not just a passive imitation of a previous edition: the model was reinterpreted considering the specific needs, issues and pecularities of the corpus I’ve been working with, making use of the possibilities provided by the XML-CEI mark-up.
The introduction of the edition is mostly focused on ‘historical’ aspects, examining some caratheristics of the documents, such as the appearance of the arenga in the documents from S. Pietro di Tramutola linked to the contemporary creation of the county of Marsico Nuovo (the nearby city where the documents were written), and the archival annotations on the verso of the documents from S. Maria di Orsoleo, as a source for the study of the history of the monastery.
The result of this work is the edition Carte di monasteri lucani: S. Pietro di Tramutola e S. Maria di Orsoleo, that is now published on Monasterium.net. Thanks to the generosity of the monastery SS. Trinità di Cava, it also includes images of the documents.
I’m very grateful for this six-month research stay in Graz, not only for the suggestions from Prof. Georg Vogeler and the members of the ERC DiDip project, but also for the new perspectives on my present and future research that this experience has provided.
The text only may be used under licence Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Domenico Scarfiello (April 10, 2026). Digital editing charters of S. Pietro di Tramutola and S. Maria di Orsoleo. DiDip. Retrieved May 18, 2026 from https://didip.hypotheses.org/5074

