On Thursday 1st December 2022 from 2pm until 6.30pm, the Documult Project are hosting a workshop on "Norman Sicily and Ifrīqiya - Documents, Scripts and Islamic Law". The event is being held at The Buttery at Wolfson College, and is open to all. To reserve a place, please email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. before November 26th. Places are limited, and entrance will be restricted to those holding confirmation of a reserved space.

Please see the attached poster for full details of the workshop programme.

18 March 2021 - From March until June 2021 a series of seminars on the Documult project are being run by the project team based at the University of Palermo. For more details please see: https://krc.web.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/krc/documents/media/i_seminari_di_documult.pdf

From June 20th to 22nd 2022 the Dipartimento di Giurisprudenza at the Università degli Studi di Palermo will be hosting a summer school titled "Documenting Legal Multiculturalism: An Historical Perspective". Please see the attached pdf for a full programme of events: summer school programme

29 November 2019: The DocuMult team organised the workshop Documenting Multiculturalism in Norman Sicily and the Islamicate East at Wolfson College, Oxford. The workshop was attended by approximately 40 participants, mainly project members, including the postdoctoral researchers from the Palermo teams, other researchers from Oxford and elsewhere, undergraduate and postgraduate students, and a few interested members of the general public.

Following an introduction and overview of DocuMult’s progress from Principal Investigator Professor Jeremy Johns, attendees heard from members of the Oxford-based team, including Dr Nadia Jamil (Senior Researcher), Dr Umberto Bongianino (Arabic Postdoctoral Researcher), and Daniel Burt (Technical Lead). The speakers presented on a range of topics relating to the Arabic legal and administrative documents of Norman Sicily, as well as the creation and development of the DocuMult database, which will be used to prepare new critical editions of the texts under study.

Two postdoctoral researchers based at the Università degli Studi di Palermo presented research from the Greek and Latin corpora, and sketched out potential directions for future research. Dr Marta Cerrito spoke on The anathema as penalty clause. A good example of plurality of iura in Sicily during the Norman period, and Dr Francesca Vuturo discussed The documents of Norman Sicily as a source for the study of Medieval Greek.

The workshop also hosted talks from members of the Invisible East programme, which is based in the Faculty of Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford. Principal Investigator Arezou Azad spoke on her two research projects, PersDoc and Go.Local, which examine the literary and material culture of medieval Afghanistan and Central Asia.

The workshop was followed by a networking event, which allowed for further discussion on the various projects.

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.

9 April 2019 – In April 2019, the Palermo launch for the DocuMult Project was hosted by the Università degli Studi di Palermo in the Church of Sant’Antonio Abate at Lo Steri. Organised by Professor Beatrice Pasciuta (Senior Researcher and Latin Team Leader) and Dr Marta Cerrito (Latin Postdoctoral Research Assistant), the event aimed to raise the project’s profile within the university itself and more generally in the city of Palermo. There were approximately 100 attendees, including university leaders, academic staff and students, local government officials and journalists, as well as members of the public.

Following a welcome and introduction from the senior leadership team of Palermo University, attendees heard presentations on topics relating to the coexistence of the different religious, ethnic and linguistic communities in Sicily during the period of Norman rule (including Arab-speaking Muslims and Jews, Greek Christians, and Latin Christians). Speakers included Oxford’s Professor Jeremy Johns, the project’s Principal Investigator, as well as the two Senior Researchers based at Palermo, Professor Beatrice Pasciuta (Latin Team Leader) and Professor Cristina Rognoni (Greek Team Leader).

Following responses from Fabio Giambrone (Deputy Mayor of the Municipality of Palermo) and academic staff based at the Università degli Studi di Palermo, the discussion was concluded by Professor Karen O’Brien (Head of the Humanities Division at the Univeristy of Oxford).