Abstract
This paper studies the diplomatic typology of the vidimus – that is, a document issued by an authority (under the guarantee of its seal) containing the transcription of an earlier document – using the methodological approach offered by the theory of linguistic contact. In fact, vidimus offer examples of linguistic contact at the written level, manifested either at the diachronic level, in the case of copies of an older text, or at the diatopic level, in the case of copies of a text originally written in another scripta, or finally at the diastratic level, when a text is copied by a more prestigious chancellery. In all three cases, the text is claimed to have been copied strictly as it was, word for word. Our analysis focuses on three particular cases of vidimus, all established by the chancellery of the prévôté of Paris: a vidimus of a charter of the Abbey of Saint-Maur-des-Fossés from September 1279 (written in October 1279), a vidimus of a charter of the provost of Senlis from July 1290 (established on 11 January 1294), and a vidimus from 24 January 1296 of a royal charter issued three weeks earlier, on 6 January 1294. What makes these cases notable is the close diachronic proximity between the original and the authenticated charter, and the similarly close diatopic proximity between the chancelleries that issued them. All these documents are part of the Documents linguistiques galloromans (DocLing) corpus and were edited within the framework of the project Linguistic variation in the Middle Ages as a system. Basics of a new scriptural description of the Gallo-Romance language area (NewScriptDesc). The present chapter analyses how the three original texts were recast at the graphic, morphological and lexical levels during the copy procedure – the concrete event that triggers contact between the language of the original document and that of the writers of the prévôté.