Script, Forms, and Asynchrony: Microareal Analysis in Diplomatics

During my research stay at the University of Graz (11-13.5.2026), within the ERC DiDip project, I had the opportunity to give a lecture entitled Script, Forms, and Asynchrony: Towards a Distant Diplomatics. I also had the opportunity to discuss some tools and working environments developed or used by the group.

In particular, I was able to test some new functions of the Monasterium system in development (MOM-NG), including the creation of baskets, presented by Thea together with Florian and Franziska. This was also an opportunity to reflect on how much the platform has changed over time, and how its new developments now make possible ways of working that, only a few years ago, would have been difficult to imagine.

From the lecture to the research question

As for my lecture, the starting point was a dossier of documents from Norman Southern Italy, taken from the critical edition of the charters of the abbey of S. Maria della Grotta near Vitulano (Ambrosio 2013 and Ambrosio et al. 2018: digitally on Monasterium.net), especially from the documentary groups of Castrum Tocci and Castrum Limatae.

However, my aim was not only to present two local cases. I wanted to start from very concrete documents, produced in inland areas of Campania between the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century, in order to ask a broader question: what happens when we try to transform palaeographical and diplomatic analysis into comparable data? And above all, what do we risk losing when we enlarge the scale of observation?

In my case, the starting point is that we cannot begin from distance, as if the data were already ready. Before comparing many documents, we need to understand which categories we are using. “Script”, “form of the act”, “notary”, “judge”, “authentication”, and “documentary type” are not neutral labels. They are words that indicate functions, roles, practices, legal traditions, and different ways of producing and validating a document.

This is where the theme of asynchrony comes from. It was the centre of my lecture. In the documents of Castrum Tocci and Castrum Limatae, we can observe that graphic change does not always move at the same rhythm as diplomatic change. A new script, or a script closer to Late Caroline and transalpine models, can be used together with forms of the act that still follow older models, connected to the Lombard documentary tradition. In other words, a document can change its appearance without changing its deeper structure at the same rhythm.

For this reason, I have worked on micro-areal analysis not simply as the study of a small area, but as a tool of control. In my case, this is not only a theoretical proposal. It is already a research practice, based on the collection of graphic and diplomatic indicators and on their comparison within limited documentary dossiers. Even a working table can become, at this stage, a first way to transform documents into controlled data, without losing their link with their historical structure.

In this sense, the micro-area is not opposed to the broad scale. Rather, it helps to build a stronger basis for comparison. But I do not imagine this relation in a rigid way, as if micro-analysis always came first and distant analysis only came later. The two dimensions can also work together. Close reading helps to build meaningful categories, while digital tools can show recurrences, anomalies, or affinities that must then be brought back to the documents.

Discussing my ideas with the DiDip team

The discussion with the DiDip group was important because it helped me move this question from my current research to possible practical solutions. After the lecture, Tamàs showed me more closely Annie and Flame, two software tools that he developed. With Annie, I could see how a semi-automatic annotation system can help to extend, to a larger corpus, categories built from the close analysis of some documents. This point struck me very much: automatic annotation is not a shortcut, but a way to test, on a larger scale, a model born from controlled palaeographical and diplomatic work.

Flame suggested another possibility. Similarity analysis can help to identify recurrences, proximities, and anomalies inside corpora that are not yet fully manageable only through close reading. Of course, a similarity is not yet a historical equivalence, and a cluster is not yet an explanation. But it can become a signal, a starting point, a trace that must then be brought back to the documents.

The dialogue with Georg also opened other directions. On the one hand, during the discussion with Georg in Graz, we considered the possible connection between analytical results and spatial representation, also in a GIS environment. This perspective was particularly meaningful for me, since I had already begun to explore GIS-based experimentation with Antonello Migliozzi, head of the Cartography Laboratory of the Museum of Agricultural Sciences, in collaboration with the DSW Lab at the University of Naples Federico II. On the other hand, we also considered the relation with broader frameworks of Western European diplomatics. This second perspective is directly connected to the way in which DiDip can bring together different case studies, different documentary traditions, and common tools of analysis. It could find a place in the more general frame of the blog post.

DiDip as a methodological space

For me, the main value of this exchange was exactly this: a question born from a specific problem in Southern Italian documentary history, the not always synchronous relation between graphic change and the transformation of the forms of the act, can become a testing ground for more general tools and methods. At the same time, the opposite movement is also important: palaeographical and diplomatic analysis can be enriched by digital methods, because these methods help us see connections, recurrences, and problems that close reading alone may sometimes leave implicit.

In this sense, DiDip is not only a project that develops digital tools. It is also a space where historical questions and computational tools can change each other.

The lecture in Graz and the discussion with the DiDip group helped me see more clearly how close analysis, micro-analysis, semi-automatic annotation, similarity analysis, and spatial visualization can belong to the same research horizon, if the categories remain historically controlled and diplomatically meaningful.

For me, the point remains this: we do not have to replace micro-analysis with distance. We have to understand how micro-analysis and distance can question each other. Data can scale, but they must continue to speak historically.

This session transformed our conceptualisation of the problem: it is less the large scale pattern, but the identification of the features that are informative for the microareal analysis: writing style, specific formulae, legal concepts, geographic location, individuals. Digital tools can therefore help us move between different scales: from selected documentary clusters to broader patterns, and then back again to close palaeographical and diplomatic interpretation.

References

Ambrosio, A. (ed.). Le pergamene di S. Maria della Grotta di Vitulano (BN) (secc. XI-XII) (Fonti per la storia del mezzogiorno medievale. 21). Carlone 2013

Ambrosio, A., Schwarz-Ricci, V. I., & Vogeler, G. (eds.). I documenti dell’Abbazia di S.Maria della Grotta di Vitulano (BN): 1200-1250 (Fonti per la storia del mezzogiorno medievale 26). Laveglia & Carlone 2018.

Ambrosio, A. La scrittura degli atti notarili latini nell’Italia meridionale normanna: i documenti del castrum e della valle di Tocco (secoli XII-XIII), in Bartoli Langeli A., Ambrosio A. & Di Meglio R. (eds.), Notariato e pratiche di scrittura in Italia meridionale e insulare (secoli XI–XV), (Quaderni del Centro Studi Santa Rosa da Viterbo), Viterbo, Sette Città, 2025, pp. 175-198.

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