MetaLEX – Historical Dictionary of Law, Legal Institutions and Legal Practice

(Falk Bretschneider with Rainer Maria Kiesow, EHESS ; René Lévy, GERN Guyancourt ; Anja Johanson, University of Dundee ; Thomas Gergen, The Max-Planck Institute for the History of Law in Europe in cooperation with the Trier Center of Digital Humanities

The goal of the project is to offer to the world of international research a tool enabling reflection on the different contexts from which words emerge and the varied usages to which they are put within the domain of the history of law, legal institutions and practices : as much by contemporaries as historians. To this end it draws on existing historical terminologies, notably on the immense reservoir of dictionaries and lexicons, professional and private, bilingual, trilingual and multilingual, produced between the 16^th and 19^th century. This resource will be exploited towards the end of an electronic dictionary available online in several languages. In sum, it will result in a specialized search engine capable of locating and linking terms across an ensemble of dictionaries from different historical periods via concordances, synonyms and other correlations.

With the support of the FMSH.