Project description
Investigating early medieval linguistic contacts in Western Europe
The ERC-funded GLOSSIT project focuses on exploring the origins of early medieval language and intellectual exchange in Western Europe. Utilising annotations or 'glosses' found in medieval manuscripts as primary sources, the project aims to deepen our understanding of the linguistic and cultural ties of this period. Despite the rich insights these glosses provide, their full potential has been hindered by a lack of comprehensive editions. To address this, GLOSSIT will create digital editions of key manuscripts of works by Bede and Priscian which contain Insular Celtic (Breton, Irish and Welsh) and Latin glosses. The project combines methods from comparative philology, historical linguistics, digital humanities, cultural history and computational biology to illuminate the complex interrelationships between these languages and their speakers.
Objective
Glosses are fingerprints of the society in which texts were composed, copied, and read. Most importantly, they play a much more significant role than previous research has acknowledged and offer insights about the multilingual and multi-ethnic environment of medieval manuscript and text production the principal texts cannot: they are first-hand testimonies of the close linguistic and cultural contacts between Insular Celtic (Old Breton, Old Irish, Old Welsh) and Latin speakers. GLOSSIT researches this largely neglected source for early medieval linguistic and intellectual exchange in Western Europe. This comparative study on the vernacular Insular Celtic and Latin glosses shows that the interlinear and marginal glosses (or paratext) of 9th–10th century manuscripts have a marginal character only at a first glance.
A striking lack of editions has so far been a strong obstacle for in-depth investigations. GLOSSIT addresses this shortcoming and produces digital editions to research the interrelationships between the languages involved (i.e. Latin/vernacular and intra-vernacular contact) as well as the knowledge transfer observable in early medieval glossing traditions. It tackles this issue through combining methods of comparative philology and historical linguistics, digital humanities (handwritten text recognition, network analysis, natural language processing), (cultural) history, and – in a first-of-its-kind approach – biological computation (applying DNA-sequence alignment methods to glosses).
The core sources are early medieval copies of the computistical works of Bede and Priscian’s Latin grammar with multiple manuscript witnesses transmitting Insular Celtic and Latin glosses. For the first time, GLOSSIT puts their glossing traditions at the centre of a large-scale investigation into language contact and knowledge exchange between the Celtic-speaking world and the Carolingian empire in an era that was foundational for Europe’s intellectual history until today
Fields of science
- humanitieslanguages and literaturelinguistics
- humanitieshistory and archaeologyhistory
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesdata sciencenatural language processing
- humanitieslanguages and literatureliterature studieshistory of literature
- humanitiesother humanitieslibrary sciencesdigital humanities
Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
8010 Graz
Austria