Die Kritische Online-Edition der Nuntiaturberichte Eugenio Pacellis (1917–1929)

Abstract

Abstract Eugenio Pacelli, the later Pope Pius XII, was already considered a leading diplomat of the Holy See when he served as nuncio in Germany. Using the critical online edition of his nuncial reports, digital humanities methodologies will be used to explore which topics dominated his reports, the diplomatic style of his nunciature and whether Pacelli adapted the form and content of his reports to the various recipients. To this end, quantitative methods of textual analysis such as the frequency distribution of types in relation to tokens as well as recourse to key terms and multi-word units (N-grams) will be employed. Moreover, methods from the field of corpus linguistics, information retrieval (TF-IDF) and quantitative stylometry (contrastive analyses with Burrows’ Delta and Zeta) are applied to evaluate both stylistic and content-related issues.