GlossIT
Available
Researchers
- Bernhard Bauer
- See the Team page of the project website for the other research team members
Description
Taken from the project website (Accessed 2025-02-27):
Celtic and Latin glossing traditions: uncovering early medieval language contact and knowledge transfer (GlossIT) (ERC CONSOLIDATOR-GRANT, Grant Agreement Number 101123203)
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.
Gloss.IT. 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.
Gloss.IT. addresses this shortcoming and produces digital editions to investigate 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, Gloss.IT. 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.