Las ‘Siete Partidas’: del pergamino a la red

Abstract

The aim of this article is to present the 7PartidasDigital project, the final outcome of which will beadigital critical edition of the ‘Siete Partidas’, the most ambitious code of law devised by king Alfonso X the Wise during the second half of the thirteenth century and still in force in some legal systems. This introduction highlights that the starting problem is the lack of a scholarly valid edition, since we only have the so-called historical editions, those printed in 1491, 1555, and 1807, plus an array of modern editions of selected sections of the text. In the second section, we explain the first step of the project, namely the need to establish the list of known witnesses. In addition, we require the codicological and content descriptions of all of these witnesses, because the sources of information, even the mostmodern ones, do not agree or are erroneous. In the third section, we discuss what type of edition we intended to create. In the fourth section, we explore the assumptions and technical criteria, based on which we will create the digital critical edition. The remainder of the paper explores what we hope to achieve with the texts once they are available in electronic format. Therefore, in the fifth section, we explain what stylometric analyses are and how they can be applied to Old Spanish texts. Finally, in the sixth section, the stylometric analysis is applied to the ‘Primera Partida’. The results show that the previous scholarship has correctly concluded that the witnesses can be grouped into three families. However they do not coincide with those purported by previous scholarship. The final section is devoted to the automatic collation of the texts by means of the Juxta program. This program not only helped us to find loci critici and problematic readings, but also to unveil some hidden patterns such as the use of more modern vocabulary in the 1491 edition, while the 1555 selected older terms – a striking feature as it is widely sustained that the 1555 edition is a derivative of the 1491 edition.