An Emperor's Anger: Political Sentiment and Document Structure in Late Roman Law, an Analysis and TEI-XML Digital Edition of the Novellae Valentiniani

Abstract

This dissertation utilizes a variety of theoretical and digital methods to argue that the Late Roman emperor Valentinian III (ruling as augustus from 425 to 455 CE), often regarded as a reason for the fall of the western Roman Empire, was not incompetent and overly emotional when it came to issuing laws. Instead, he was operating within an acceptable range of behavior when compared to other emperors, given the limited options he possessed for resolving problems during this age of crisis. The laws examined are the unabridged "new laws" (novellae) issued by Valentinian III and other emperors after the adoption of the fifth-century Theodosian Code as the standard legal reference for the empire, but before the creation of the sixth-century Justinian's Code.

The core of this research is to apply, by way of analogy, a "religious studies" approach to Late Roman law, where laws are forms of text within a context, and there is greater interest in analyzing the actions and behaviours that result than the logic of the laws alone. This is contrast to what I interpret as more traditional "theological" approaches, where law is a legal science and its experts actively try to discern and adhere to the internal consistency of that body of "sacred" text.

This "religious studies" approach is taken in the following ways. (1) The dissertation uses Marxian-inspired Critical Legal frameworks as a basis for re-interpreting Valentinian's laws through a political lens so that they no longer seem unsound; (2) it takes modern sentiment analysis techniques and applies them to the Latin in the post-Theodosian novellae to compare their emotional intensity and to establish which groups were politically favored or disfavored by emperors; (3) it hybridizes the sociological theories of Michael Mann and the social conflict theories of Late Roman historian Peter N. Bell to create a new understanding for the classification and imperial management of political conflict as they appear in the laws; and lastly (4) it employs eXtensible Markup Language (XML) using the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) schema to assist in the creation of a new digital edition of the post-Theodosian novellae.