Electronic Repository of Greater Poland Oaths (1386-1448)

eROThA (Electronic Repository of Greater Poland Oaths) is a free electronic database created as a result of a research project funded by the National Science Centre in Poland (OPUS No. 2014/13/B/HS2/00644). The repository incorporates a selection of the oldest surviving secular materials written in Old Polish (beyond place-names and glosses). Such utterances, i.e. records of ritualised oaths given in the trials of contemporary nobility, appear within Latin land court books compiled in Wielkopolska (Greater Poland) in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries (1386-1448). Selections from these materials were first made available outside the archive in editions published in the late nineteenth and throughout the twentieth century (Kowalewicz and Kuraszkiewicz 1959: 6-9; Jurek 1991: x-xi and Trawińska 2009: 345-346 provide overviews and the relevant references). The monumental editorial work conducted by Kowalewicz and Kuraszkiewicz (1959-81) has provided the most extensive selection and was hence adopted as the basis for the digitisation work and the design of the electronic repository. The eROThA database is a product of an interdisciplinary enterprise, aiming to enhance the printed editions with high quality scans (c. 6,000 manuscript pages), make the source texts more accessible, and add a layer of well-focused linguistic analysis (more on this in Multilingualism and code-switching and From a printed edition to a digital repository). Thanks to this project, the fragile facsimiles are now digitally preserved and easily accessible to scholars – historians, legal historians and historical linguists in particular – as well as to the wider public. The high resolution archival images available on the website will also be indispensable to auxiliary disciplines of history, such as diplomatics, paleography or codicology and to any work on the materiality of medieval artefacts. The basic unit selected for presentation on our platform is an Old Polish utterance with the relevant Latin context (more on this in What is rota and selection issues). The red frame drawn on the facsimile marks out the text of the oath together with the Latin introduction (preamble or protocol) and other relevant content. The textual version presented parallel on the platform covers the designated part of the manuscript. In some cases, the relevant Latin section occurring after the oath has also been included in the text. The Old Polish term for the oath is rota, often borrowed into the procedural Latin and spelled as rotha. This spelling may be viewed as a latinised version of the Slavic stem (see Kopaczyk-Włodarczyk-Adamczyk 2016: 20, f.6 for details), which underlines the fluid boundaries between the vernacular and Latin legal lexicon. These mutual multilingual relationships have inspired the abbreviated name of the eROThA. The label of the online platform also includes an anagram for the English translation (eROThA ~ oath)