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General Documentation


i. i. Quantification issues


The documentation has been quantified by recording the number of documents preserved for each year according to the dates provided by the editors of each collection used (See Institutions. ii Documentary editions).

There is no unanimous view among scholars as to the very concept of 'document' or 'text unit'. While this will not be discussed here, in order to provide an appropriate assessment of how the documents were counted, these discrepancies must be taken into account, as they affect both the charters copied in cartularies and those that have survived as single-sheet parchments. The cartularies often include lists of transactions related to a particular location, but made by different individuals. In these cases, whereas some editors argue that each one of them should be considered as an individual document, others believe that the whole set needs to be considered as a single document. One of the most obvious cases of this discrepancy between editors is found in the editions of the famous Becerro Galicano of the Monasterio de San Millán. This case also provides a good illustration of how the PRJ database has been developed and of its dynamic character. While the rationale used by each editor has been applied, new research has been taken into consideration. Using the recent electronic edition of this cartulary (http://www.ehu.eus/galicano/), we have been able to assess the discrepancies in quantitative results according to the various editorial criteria employed. A representative example is the list of of San Millán's possessions in Hiniestra, contained in document 382 of the electronic edition. This has been categorised into more than thirty documents in Ubieto's edition (núm. 31, 33, 34, 48, 51, 55, 56, 58, 60, 61, 71, 103 - 107, 109, 114, 117, 120, 121, 124, 125, 127, 128, 147-149, 155-165, 167-169, 200 y 203), as many as the number of documented transactions.

The various criteria adopted by scholars and the subsequent quantification issues arising from them have also had an impact on the documents that have survived in single-sheet parchments. When a parchment contained several texts, some editors have separated them, since they considered each of them as an individual document, whereas others have kept them together as a single document unit.

As a result, the total number of charters differs in the various existing editions. However, it is our belief that, in the general scope of the documents preserved and quantified in the PRJ database, these disparities do not constitute crucial deviations. Therefore, while the statistics should be considered to be tentative estimates subject to correction, this large document census is undoubtedly useful for comparative purposes.