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New Look and Updates

I recently moved old posts to this new, easier-to-read look.

Work continues on the annotation of Book I. Unsurprisingly, the biggest challenge lies in matching Bodin’s references to commentaries on Roman Law, although certain references to arrêts of the Parlement of Paris have also proven hard to track down. Bodin had access to an Olim [register of the arrêts] that is unlike the selective summaries contained in Beugnot’s 19th-century survey. Thus, even though the cases can be cross-referenced through other sources, Bodin’s specific citations to folios and numbers cannot. An example of this problem can be found towards the end of I.8, in the Latin version, where Bodin cites an arrêt from 1256 in support of his claim that sovereigns are not bound by the promises of their predecessors.

Greg Crane recently brought to my attention a tool called Rescribe, which is aimed at improving OCR of historical texts. I am looking forward to testing it on French and Latin copies, to compare its results to the early attempts at OCR using a trained version of ABBYY. I will report the results here.