“Stick to the Word you Can Afford”. An ERC Project: Migrating Commercial Law and Language (MiCOLL) (short paper)

In this paper, we will briefly present the main objective of the ERC Project Migrating Commercial Law and Language (MICOLL) that started at the end of 2021 at the Univeristy of Padova. This project consists in approaching the issue of the existence of a medieval and early modern lex mercatoria [1], the law of merchants in a completely new way: by analyzing the technical legal terms used by merchants between the Late Middle Ages and the early modern period (11th-17th century), focusing on some of the most important trading centers of northern Italy (Venice and Genoa) and Germany (Nuremberg and Lübeck). The project will make use of semi-automated approach for the creation of concept maps of the multilingual glossaries needed to interpret the legal terms, and automated techniques to enrich ancient digitized maps.