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There are many archives across Europe with boxes upon boxes of old documents, 100's of years old, that nobody simply has had time to look at. If it weren't for
by roel_v 9y ago
There are many archives across Europe with boxes upon boxes of old documents, 100's of years old, that nobody simply has had time to look at. If it weren't for a 'History of the Law in the Southern Netherlands' course I took as part of my law degree (and frankly, I took it because the schedule fit better around my job than other courses), I would never even have known about the archive near me. The professor took us there one day, we signed in, got given some latex gloves and were each handed a box of documents from the medieval archives of the city (by one of the librarians). They were all old court cases, and the assignment was basically to look through them for a case that looked interesting, try to read it, and write a report on the judicial organization and procedural rules in it.
Anyway, to get to your point: yes it's awesome reading these old accounts of seemingly mundane things, so many years ago, sometimes references places or houses that still exist. I don't think I could ever be a historian and do it for years on end, but just sniffing around a bit (and in a repurposed medieval church, with the complete surroundings just breathing that 'The name of the Rose' feeling, in my case) is, in a way, intellectually exhilarating (who would have thought anyone would ever describe reading 500 year old court cases 'exhilarating'...).
- isolli 9y agoI wonder if someone plans to digitize these documents. That would open them to everyone, and even to data mining...
- cr1895 9y ago> They were all old court cases, and the assignment was basically to look through them for a case that looked interesting, try to read it, and write a report on the judicial organization and procedural rules in it. That sounds like a really interesting course! How difficult was it to parse the old Dutch?
- roel_v 9y agoQuite difficult TBH. Not only the different spelling, but also that there were lots of different words than we use now for the same thing, and cases where the old word looked like a weird form of something of today but then turned out to be very different; and then all the linguistic embellishment. Instead of saying "x and y happened on date z" (as you would read in today's court transcripts), it would say "and so then it happened that, upon so many days after Easter, when the moon was full, also indicated as the year of the lord so and so and this month, that the horrible event of which we are talking about today too place, where first x was said by person bla", ... - on and on and on. I wonder how they got anything done those days. If you're into this sort of thing (and know Dutch), a really fun read is "Een notabel boecxken van cokeryen", a Dutch cook book from around 1510. Annotated (translated) version available at http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/_not001nota01_01/_not001nota01_01.pdf http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/_not001nota01_01/_not001nota01_01.... . Illustrates the issues above very well.
- cr1895 9y agoNeat! I'm learning Dutch and can understand some of what's in that old cookbook, still not easy though. Kind of surprised at all of the spices it calls for...must have been food eaten by the wealthy. The old Dutch in that book looks a little like Frisian, as far as I can tell.
- coldpie 9y agoIf you like this kind of stuff, there's a Dutch researcher who maintains a blog about old books, many of which are in old Dutch: https://medievalbooks.nl/ https://medievalbooks.nl/ Sadly not updated in over a year, but there are a lot of gems in the archives.