Project aims

The project has two primary aims. The first is to explore the textual transmission of selected texts. Each investigator shall focus on a specific group of medieval Latin texts concerned with a particular theme, which resonated in late medieval society. The themes chosen are dreams, property, and the eucharist, and the textual types are manuals, treatises destined for monastic audience and less formal reflections for a wider public including laics. These types of texts were intended for different social groups and thus the comparison of their transmission can shed light on transcribing practices in their respective environments. The second aim is to create an experimental application that will use artificial intelligence to analyse these groups of exemplars, provide information on their differences as well as revealing phenomena that might otherwise go unnoticed.

Phase one

In Phase 1 (04/2021-03/2022), the team members will each work on their respective texts, but they will be in constant touch, discussing the research questions and methods. They will collect all relevant exemplars of the chosen texts and analyse them. The prototype of the aforementioned AI tool will be developed and constantly tested with our collected sets of data to assess its efficiency. The first type of text used for testing will be Somniale Danielis as the text is the simplest of the three. The progress and any difficulties will be further discussed with specialists and scholars from the collaborating universities. At the end of Phase 1 (spring 2022), there will be a workshop taking place at the Sorbonne (4EU partner), organized by our partner, Dr. Géraldine Veysseyre, a medievalist focusing on the late medieval transmission of popular French texts, where the results in progress will be presented and feedback gained.

Phase two

In Phase 2 (04/2022-03/2023), results of the work from the previous phase will be evaluated and the experimental tool further developed and refined to work with the other the texts and subsequently with any medieval Latin text. At the end of Phase 2 (February-March 2023), a workshop will take place organized by the strategic partner, the University of Zurich by Prof. Carmen Cardelle de Hartmann, medieval latininst and an expert in manuscript transmission, where the team will present the results. Both the professors from the partner institutions have agreed to work as the project consultants and provide feedback throughout the project implementation.

We aim to build a tool usable by other scholars to analyse larger sets of variant Latin texts and show their differences in a quick and easy manner. We are aware that this is a highly experimental tool and might not prove to be efficient enough; however, should it work, it will simplify the process of analysing multiple exemplars of one text. While being high risk – high gain, this project will offer valuable results in medieval Latin studies even should its experimantal digital-humanities dimension fail.