CESTA Seminar Series with Dr. Rowan Dorin, Thawsitt Naing, and Clara Romani
Please join us Tuesday, October 15th, in the seminar room at CESTA (Bldg. 160, Rm. 433A) from 12:00–1:00pm for the second lecture in our fall quarter CESTA Seminar Series.
Dr. Rowan Dorin, Thawsitt Naing, and Clara Romani will present:
"Corpus Synodalium: Mapping Law (and Resistance) in Late Medieval Europe"
Abstract: The bishops of late medieval Europe issued thousands of laws, on subjects ranging from the regulation of midwives to the tithing of livestock, and even on what to do if a spider fell into the communion wine. Yet despite the value ofthis legal corpus as a source for the social and religious history of the late Middle Ages, its sheer scale (to say nothingof the challenges of scattered manuscripts, indecipherable handwriting, linguistic variety, and messy textual trans-mission) has long deterred scholars from exploiting its riches. In this talk, we will present Corpus Synodalium, a new online database that gathers together the extant corpus of medieval episcopal legislation into a user-friendly platform that supports a range of text analysis tools as well as an innovative mapping function. The talk will be of particular interest to scholars working with non-English or multilingual sources, as well as those seeking to integrate spatial visualizations into textual research.
Bios: Rowan Dorin has been an Assistant Professor of History at Stanford since 2017, and is the project leader for the Corpus Synodalium project. His research and teaching focus primarily on western Europe and the Mediterranean during the Middle Ages (500-1500 CE), and he is currently working on two books, the first exploring the rise of mass expulsion in late medieval Europe, and the second examining the ways in which religious law was adapted or resisted in local contexts in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. He has also published articles on Mediterranean trade networks, crusader art, and the production of medieval manuscripts. Thawsitt Naing is a recent Stanford CS grad (class of 2019). He was the lead developer for the Corpus Synodalium database and mapping visualization websites. Currently, he is working on building delightful and accessible user interfaces at ThoughtSpot. Clara Romani is a senior double majoringin History and French with a minor in Italian. She has been delighted to work on the mapping end of Corpus Synoda- lium project for the past two and a half years, and is currently beginning her own research with an honor’s thesis on Medieval French History.