2003 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
Studies of administrative and managerial documents in the post-roman era in Western Europe
| Project/Area Number |
12410100
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
History of Europe and America
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| Research Institution | Nagoya University |
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Principal Investigator |
SATO Shoichi Nagoya University, School of Letters, Professor, 文学研究科, 教授 (80131126)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2000 – 2003
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| Keywords | post-roman era / Lombard kingdom / Senatorial aristocracy / administrative document / slate documents / Visigothic kingdom / seven Anglo-Saxon kingdom / Tribal Hidage |
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| Research Abstract |
The scientific aim of this research project consists of revealing structures in document's use in the post-roman era in Lombard Italy, Visigothic Spain and Anglo-Saxon England. The historiographical background of this is to rehabilitate the statehood to those kingdoms, which has been denied at by several generations of historians.
Under the Ostrogothic kings, and also Lombard sovereigns, the kingdoms of Germanic tribes in Italy could govern for the most part of their territories by virtue of document use until mid-seventh Century, when along the end of cultural tradition from the Antiquity for sophisticated taste in literature, collapsed the documental practices in the administrative machinery on this soil.
I have done a preliminary research about the documents inscribed on slate materials which reproduced a variety of deeds employed certainly under Visigothic kings in Spain. Unfortunately, the state of research on the matter does not permit us to get answers for most part of questions, were it the functions, origins and social and legal utilities of those documents. However, one thing is certain : the Visigothic state got acquainted with document's use for its administration exactly like other Germanic successor kingdoms.
Concerning Anglo-Saxon kingdom, we have a mysterious series of parchments which were, all of them, copies executed a few centuries after that had been made their original documents whose name is "Tribal Hidage". As those fiscal and cadastral documents suggest, there had to be, at least, in some Anglo-Saxons kingdoms a tradition of establishing the written record in order to run an administrative machinery whose structure ought to be an objective for further research project.
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