8-9 April 2021 - The second DocuMult workshop took place on the afternoons of Thursday 8 and Friday 9 April 2021 online via Microsoft Teams. Attended by members of the Oxford and Palermo project teams, members of the Academic Advisory Committee and other invited scholars, the purpose of the event was to examine and discuss legal formulae and terminology in documents written in all three of the principal administrative languages of Norman Sicily — Arabic, Greek and Latin — and to discuss how these might best be investigated by the DocuMult database.

The first day (which was conducted primarily in English) began with a brief Introduction (Johns) describing the progress of the project so far. It was followed by two sessions, each containing papers devoted the three principal administrative languages of Norman Sicily (Arabic, Latin and Greek), followed by open discussion: Session 1: Cultural isolation, self-sufficiency and synthesis in the legal formularies of the private documents of Norman Sicily (Jamil, Johns, Pasciuta, Rognoni), and Session 2: Formularies of Norman power: the creation of the vocabulary of royal power (Cerrito, Johns, Vuturo).

The second day (conducted primarily in Italian) was comprised of a single session: Session 3: Tagging Le Parole della Legge (Johns, Merli, Pasciuta, Potenza), and focussed on technical issues surrounding the tagging of legal formulae and terminology in the DocuMult database, as well as considering the format of the final output for this fundamental research tool.