We have been recapping the awards announced at the recent meeting of the American Society for Legal History. Today we cover an award that is near and dear to our hearts here at LHB: the Mary L. Dudziak Digital Legal History Prize, "awarded annually to an outstanding digital legal history project."
This year's prize went to Rowan Dorin for Corpus Synodalium. The citation:
Corpus Synodalium, created by Rowan Dorin, Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University, is a database-in-progress that includes 90 percent (approximately 1,400 texts) of the extant local ecclesiastical legislation issued across Latin Christendom from ca. 1215 - ca. 1400. It includes a mapping tool that offers a first-of-its-kind method for tracing change over time across an ecclesiastical geography. As Professor Sara McDougall explains, this database “is a vital resource in seeking to understand local church law, the legislative activity of bishops, as iterated throughout medieval Europe. Previously. . . trying to get at what local church law was in any one place in Medieval Europe, let alone compare it to other places, or try to track changes over time, was quite impossible. This matters because it is so useful to know what was actually happening ‘on the ground’ all over Europe as opposed to focusing only on the decrees issued by the papacy, if we want to know anything about the spread and implementation of any of these ideas and what all that meant for people in practice.” The committee applauds Dr. Dorin for the scholarly importance, creativity, and intellectual generosity of this marvelous digital legal history project.
Congratulations to Professor Dorin! And thank you to the members of the prize committee, chaired by David Tanenhaus, for their service.
-- Karen Tani