Annotation

Prior to the invention of the printing press, texts destined for circulation were disseminated through a succession of individual handwritten copies, which were more or less faithful to the exemplar. Since only ca. 2-8% of medieval manuscripts have come down to us, reconstructing the relationships among the surviving exemplars of a particular text has been a challenge to scholars. Our project combines medieval Latin studies and digital humanities to explore and untangle the complex textual transmission of three types of late medieval Latin texts on popular topics: dream manuals, treatises concerning property in monasteries, and refelections on the reception of the Eucharist. For that purpose, we will develop and test an experimental application that will utilise neural networks to compare large amount of textual data to show differences between each variant of the same chosen text.

The project results will include case studies scrutinizing the manuscript relationships as well as their cultural, historical and social implications for each of the themes, as well as this more generally applicable experimental digital application.