Anonymous Old English preaching texts, written and copied between the ninth and late twelfth centuries, survive in ca. 350 versions in ca. 60 manuscripts. They represent the most comprehensive vernacular preaching corpus of medieval Europe before 1200 AD and depend almost entirely on a wide variety of Latin sources from all over the Continent. This project revolutionises scholarly work on Old English anonymous homilies by tracing, visualising, and studying their highly complex material and textual transmission in full. It recovers, unites, and systematises all surviving Old English anonymous homilies (ca. 555,000 words) in an online and interactive digital corpus that brings to the fore the individual manuscript version and all its revisional layers from before 1200. The project counters traditional editorial models of collation by exposing substantial textual difference and by analysing compositional and variational procedures by means of digital tools. This enables users for the first time to comprehensively study Old English anonymous homilies as living texts through the centuries. ECHOE a) introduces a new taxonomy for the homiletic corpus, b) identifies the closest Latin and Old English sources, c) maps the compositional structure of mobile textual units between related versions of the corpus, d) marks up decisive palaeographical features, idiosyncratic diction, formulas, themes, and genres, and e) assesses the historical, social, and theological dimension of revisions and the roles of individual revisers. The digital corpus reveals for the first time the complex network of interrelated versions and allows for a swift comparison of parallels and their sources. It further allows modern audiences to explore the chronological relations between Old English homilies and their European sources, and opens up new perspectives on the identity of authors, revisers, users, and audiences.
This project is important for modern society, because it opens up new ways of understanding peripheral, non-élite education in Europe and gauges the impact of religious doctrine on European society, and England in particular. The results not only reveal how preachers composed their speeches and which fictional and rhetorical elements and cultural memes they employed for elocutionary purposes, it also traces the actual performances of these texts, by highlighting, quantifying and studying the rhetorical manuscript mark up. The project, now completed, provides unique data on the construction of doctrinal discourse and traces phenomena such as source authority, (self-)censorship as well as the legal and political tailoring of texts into changing historical contexts. The project is further important because it provides novel forms of big data analysis, such as in the area of identifying shared as well as individual stylistic elements of Old English homiletic prose and profiling individual scribal hands. In doing so it is exposing the beauty of rhetorical and palaeographical idiosyncrasy, trying to balance it with modern forms of the technologizing of the word in editing, well aware of the risks that digital standardisation can hold for the survival and knowledge of various types of texts. The project also raises awareness for language change as well as for early languages that lack orthographic consistency, exposing the creative potential involved in this phenomenon, but also providing solutions to tackle this issue with the help of respective search engines. For the field of Old English, the origin of the modern world language of English, ECHOE has not only created a substantial and reliable data basis that will enable further groundbreaking research in linguistics, palaeography, social history or theology, it has also set standards for the transcription and encoding of Old English prose and produced a benchmark for multilingual synoptic editions through its design, indexes, and tools.
