Abstracts

Bruno Bon, Comité Du Cange – IRHT, France
Renaud Alexandre, Comité Du Cange – IRHT, France
Sébastien Hamel, Comité Du Cange – IRHT, France
Nathalie Picque, Comité Du Cange – IRHT, France

This paper will present the first results of the "Velum. Visualising, exploring and linking resources for
Medieval Latin" (2018-2023, https://www.glossaria.eu/velum) project. Our aims is to build a representative textual corpus of Medieval Latin for the redaction of the "Novum Glossarium Mediae
Latinitatis" (= NGML, https://www.glossaria.eu/ngml), the international dictionary of Medieval Latin that was launched in the 1920s to describe the main language of the European textual production between 800 and 1200 AD. While the dictionary was for a long time only based on empirical quotations, the actual digital text collections, mostly literary, don’t fit our lexicographical needs.
The Velum 100 million words corpus is composed from a large selection of the 10 000 sources of the
NGML, based on the "Index Scriptorum Mediae Latinitatis" (https://www.glossaria.eu/scriptores), either
extracted from existing digital collections, or from scratch when PDF-files were only available. While the
first texts had to be 'only' XML structured, we had to massprocess the 1 500 latter through image
extraction and optimisation, OCR-isation, correction, reduction and zone selection, so the corpus as to be
able to get the pure Latin text (without any editorial content).
All the texts will soon be annotated both on text (genre, localisation, datation) and word level (PoS, lemma), using the tools developped for Medieval Latin by our previous project "Omnia" (https://www.glossaria.eu/lemmatisation).

Martin Dekarli, Department of Auxiliary Historical Sciences and Archival Sciences, University of Hradec Králové

There is a common scholarly consensus about John Wyclif's (d. 1384) collection of treatises
known as Summa de ente (alternatively Summa intellectualium), which was planned into two
books and contained thirteen tracts. Furthermore, scholars also agree that Wyclif, after
retirement to Lutterworth parish in 1382, collected and entirely revised all his compiled works
with the help of his adherents. One of the rare records of Summa de ente existence is a short
record made by an unknown scribe on the front flyleaf of the parchment manuscript
Cambridge, Trinity College, B.16.2 dated today terminus post quem 1384 and terminus ante
quem 1400. Another proof of evidence provides references in manuscript Wien,
Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, 4307 originated in Bohemia around 1433. The proposed
lecture aims to present a review of current knowledge about Wyclif's Summa de ente along
with collections of previous works and some issues associated with the text-editing of Doctor
Evangelicus.

Paolo Divizia, Deparment of Romance Languages and Literatures, Masaryk University, Brno

A manuscript, and even more a multi-text manuscript, is a complex entity consisting of a physical component (the manuscript as a codex or a compound of more codexes or codicological units) and an intangible one (the manuscript as a witness to one ore more texts), which intertwine a history (the object, produced to bear one or more texts, might have not always been like we know it today) and a tradition (the texts come from one or more models which were physical, in turn). Whatever the main focus and purpose, codicological or textual, of studying one or more manuscripts, the other approach cannot be overlooked, if not at risk of terrible blunders. Thus the textual scholar will have to consider his witness as a structural object with its own history, change and damage over time; while the codicologist will have to consider his codex as a text-bearing cultural artefact which, unless it is an authograph, has one or more models behind.

A catalogue of manuscript cannot linger on details of textual transmission, however, as an access tool to book collections, it must provide useful information to all those scholars who deal with manuscripts studies. Through a few case studies, the talk will deal with concepts like the need of identifying texts in manuscripts or at least helping other scholars to identify them, perspective mistakes in describing the completness or structure of a text, bibliographic deficiencies, codicological material evidence vs. diachronic approach in textual criticism, textual units of transmission and, most of all, the need of a multidisciplinary approach in manuscript studies.

Matteo Esu, LabEx Hastec, IRHT-CNRS, Paris

The literary genre of the so-called Commentaries on the Sentences of Peter Lombard constituted
for at least four centuries (13th-16th) the basis of theology teaching and production, and each
advanced student had to lecture on it (eventually composing his own commentary) to obtain
the title of doctor theologiae. A historiographical tradition has described their evolution in a polar
and one-sided way: after the commentaries on the ‘golden period’ of the Scholasticism (Thomas,
Bonaventure, Scotus etc.), subsequent authors did nothing but produce imitations and copies of the
aforementioned, extrapolating and weaving pieces together, often adding little or nothing
original. For some time now, scholars have gone beyond this narrative, recognizing a specific
evolution in the genre. However, an undeniable textual fact remains: the diffuse plagiarism (or copy-and-paste technique) in many texts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. How to explain and describe this phenomenon of bricolage textuel in non-anachronistic and judgmental terms?

The speech focuses on the Vienna faculty of Theology, a field of research yet to be thoroughly
explored; here, within the so-called Vienna Group Commentary (VGC), the ‘loan’ of entire
textual sections was a current and already documented practice. After having explained this phenomenon according to some cultural and social causes, I will try to understand it through the contemporary concept of 'open-source authorship'. The hypothesis will be grounded on different case-studies from the textual tradition of the VGC, its transmission and evolution. In the background, the belief that new conceptual categories and theorization can help us better understand intellectual practices that could seem far from our academic traditions.

Martin Fiedler, Mittellateinisches Wörterbuch, Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, München

Manuscript 504 from the Bibliothèque municipale de Troyes (T) is a stroke of luck for philologists: it contains the text of one of Gregory the Great's most influential works, his Regula pastoralis. For decades, specialists have been convinced that it is either the autograph or at least the original text into which Gregory himself entered corrections.

But the textual history is more complicated: the last critical edition dates from the beginning of the 1990s (ed. Judic/Rommel, Sources chrétiennes 381/382, 1992). However, the editors do not take into account the different textual layers. However, on the basis of preliminary work by Italian scholars and my own collations of about 20 manuscripts, two versions of the Regula can be produced for the first time (T1 and T2), the second of which represents the final version. However, from the beginning, the approximately 800 surviving manuscripts mostly offer a text contaminated from both versions. Only one manuscript (P) (Arch. Cap. S. Pietro D. 164, Vatican Library) offers an almost intact text of T2. In addition, the collation of T has revealed that Gregory's text deviates in some places from the SCh edition.

The new critical edition, which is expected to be published by Herder in 2023 with an introduction, translation and concise commentary, faces various editorial problems: for T contains gaps, Gregory's corrections are not always coherent or stringent. A complete standardisation of Gregor's Latin (as in the SCh) fails to recognise the recognisable decadence of the state of the language - there are numerous vulgarisms in the text which have not always been corrected and not throughout.

The production of a more sound text of the Regula resembles a philological thriller with many open questions.

Stefan Hagel, Universität Wien / Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften

While never having edited a text myself, I have been in constant exchange with editors in numerous fields, related to the development and use of the Classical Text Editor. Although this word-processing application has been supporting XML output using a subset of the TEI standard for almost a quarter of a century, most users are still focusing on print versions, probably highlighting traditional career demands in the humanities no less than their proponents’ suspicion towards electronic means. I will consider challenges concerning a meaningful digital presentation as well as pathways towards solutions, and share experiences from a recent unconventional project, the online edition of ancient musical documents.

Kateřina Ptáčková and Antonín Kalous, Department of History, Palacký University, Olomouc

Bohemian Lands at the seccond half of the 15^th and the beginning of the 16^th century experienced very lively and unsettled period of life: the coexistence of two main religious groups, Utraquists and Catholics, was neither easy, nor peacefull. However, even inside the Catholic church there were different groups and denominations, striving for reformation of the church, whose coexistence wasn not calm either.

We would like to speak about the Franciscan observant movement and about their chronicle tradition that illuminates the atmosphere of religious life in Bohemian Lands in that time. Preparing the edition of the Chronicle of Michael of Carinthia (and other texts) we are facing several problems and questions we would like to share with the audience. A special concern will be dedicated to the different literary types of the textual corpus, especialy to the legal text that opens the Chronicle itself.

Paweł Kras, Centre for Medieval Studies, John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin

In research on the views of the Free Spirit and their reception among beguines, an important place is occupied by the record of interrogations on the life and mores of the Hooded Nuns of Świdnica (Germ. Schweidnitz) which took place between 8 and 12 September 1332. In the unanimous opinion of researchers who have ever studied this protocol, it is a unique source as it provides a lot of detailed, often intimate information about the functioning of this small community of beguines both before and after the publication of the Decree Ad nostrum, promulgated by the Council of Vienne in 1312. In fact, the Świdnica protocol is the only such extensive and detailed record of testimonies concerning the beguines community which until 1332 survived in its original form, undisturbed by the provisions of Ad nostrum. The trial was conducted by John of Schwenkenfeld acting papal inquisitor in the diocese of Wrocław, and at the same time lector at the Świdnica Dominican friary.

Fifty years ago, Robert E. Lerner in his magisterial study on the Heresy of the Free Spirit analyzed the content of the 1332 protocol and demonstrated the dominant role of the papal inquisitor who conducted interrogations, as well as supervised production of their records. He was also the first historian who not only worked with the nineteenth-century edition, based upon the fifteenth century copy (currently preserved in the Archives of the Krakow Cathedral Chapter, Ms AKKK LA 37), but also examined the original notarial instrument with the records of the 1332 interrogations which luckily have survived in the Vatican Library under the catalogue number Vat. Lat. 13119a, though were found as late as 1950s. In the years 2015-2017, the work on the new critical edition of the protocol enabled Tomasz Gałuszka O.P. to identify over 500 places in the Vatican manuscript which have different readings from the Krakow copy. Most of these differences are technical in nature and do not affect the content of the testimonies recorded. There are, however, a number of omissions in the text and very significant spelling differences that change the meaning of the text.

The protocol of the 1332 investigation covers the inquisitorial proceedings and other actions taken by the inquisitor. All deponents were Germans and the questioning was held in German. Their testimonies were collected and written down by assistant notary, revised by Schwenkenfeld, and finally recorded in the notarial instrument. During the work on the official register all testimonies were translated from German into Latin. Only a few German words were left to describe items that – according to the notary’s knowledge – had no proper equivalents in Latin. In the Latin protocol, with a few exceptions, the inquisitor’s questions were removed and the statements were edited based on Schwenkenfeld’s interrogatory used during the interrogations. The notary left some questions only in a few places.

My paper is intended to present challenges experienced during the editorial work on the 1332 protocol which has revealed the multifaceted process of producing records of heresy trial.

Iwona Krawczyk, Institute of Polish Language Polish Academy of Sciences, Cracow
Renaud Alexandre, Institut de Recherche et d'Histoire des Textes CNRS, Paris
Krzysztof Nowak, Institute of Polish Language Polish Academy of Sciences, Cracow

Vocabularium Bruxelense is a name attributed by scholars to a Medieval Latin vocabulary preserved in a
manuscript conserved at the Royal Library of Belgium (Ms. Bruxelles, B.R., II 1049).
This lexicographic compilation dated to the mid-12th century is believed to be the work of an anonymous
Cistercian monk (Weijers 1996).
For centuries the text was only available in handwritten version. The first steps towards publication of the
Vocabularium were made by a Dutch researcher, H.F. Reijnders, who prepared a transcription of the text
and added a draft version of the apparatus. Based on those materials, a group of lexicographers from
France and Poland created a digital edition of the dictionary. After data conversion and XML annotation
of the text, the electronic version of Vocabularium Bruxellense was published in open access through a
TEI Publisher application.
This paper outlines the challenges we faced during the editing work, which involved both data modelling
and manual and semi-automatic XML annotation. We could take inspiration from large electronic editions
such as Liber glossarum (Grondeux & Cinato 2016), but to adequately reflect the complex structure of the
vocabularium, it was necessary to develop our own annotation system.
It was a considerable interpretative effort to determine the boundaries between the parts of the definitions,
which vary in form and may be a few words of description typical of glossaries, or they may contain
extensive etymology, synonyms, encyclopaedic information or numerous quotations to illustrate usage.
Our aim in the XML annotation was to present and highlight individual elements of the original structure
of the entries, but also to include in the edition the rudimentary apparatus prepared by H.F. Reijnders and
completed during the project.

References

Grondeux, Anne and Cinato, Franck. 2016. ‘Liber Glossarum Digital’. http://liber-glossarum.huma-
num.fr.

Weijers, Olga. 1996. ‘Notice Sur Le «Vocabularium Bruxellense»’. *ALMA. Archivum Latinitatis Medii
Aevi*, 233-238, 54.

Helena Krmíčková and Libor Švanda, Department of Classical Studies, Masaryk University, Brno

The fact that scholars still lack a critical edition of many writings of M. Jan Hus, the leading figure of the Czech Reformation movement, is a paradox that will probably astonish anyone who begins to study the Czech Reformation and wants to get to the primary sources. Although the origins of the Magistri Iohannis Hus Opera omnia series (MIHOO), which aims to make available thematically organized critical editions of Hus's writings, date back to the 1950s, only about half of the planned 26 volumes have been published so far. This deficiency is being eliminated very slowly.

The beginnings of the series are connected with the names of Bohumil Ryba and Anežka Vidmanová, who set the basic rules for publishing Hus's writings. Other distinguished editors followed and over the years a number of high quality editions have been prepared. For a long time they were published by Academia – the publishing house of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, and in recent decades by Brepols Publishers, as a part of Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis series (CC CM). The Brno editorial group has been trying to build on their work since 2005. They have published a number of studies, made Czech translations of some of Hus's texts and prepared critical editions which were published in the 17th and 24th volume of the MIHOO series: Enarratio Psalmorum (CC CM 253, 2013) and Constantiensia (CC CM 274, 2016). The group is now working on the edition of the 21st volume, entitled Tractatus varii, which will contain Huss's treatises mainly from 1408–1412.

Anna Ledzińska, Institute of Polish Language, Polish Academy of Sciences, Cracow

The paper presents the preparation of the transcription of Arbor vitae crucifixae Christi - a monumental 14th-century book written by Ubertino of Casale. The title task is part of the ongoing project intituled: The >Liber< of Angela of Foligno and heterodox movements in Umbria in the years 1270-1320. My main responsibility in the project is to study connections between the ideas of Angela and those of Spiritual Franciscans as described by Ubertino (Marini 1999) using philological methods including natural language processing. The second objective is to prepare a simple edition of the Arbor, which will be available online in open access.

Therefore, this presentation tends to describe the choices made to obtain a text on the one hand apt to further detailed digital processing in the project, and on the other, accessible and usable for different scientific purposes. So firstly, in lack of critical edition and having considered the textual tradition (Ruiz 2014) the Venetian old print book from 1485 is chosen as a basic source of the text (Davies 1961). Secondly, it is decided to transcribe it with Transkribus (Nockels 2022) - the platform for AI-powered text recognition of historical documents and the paper outlines subsequent stages of this task: preparation of the PDF file to the optical recognition, training of the neural network to get the HTR+ model, applying the model and its effects. Thirdly, some solutions have been found for the standardization of spelling and punctuation marks, which is crucial for later lemmatization and morphological analysis (Piotrowski 2012, 69-100).

From time to time there are reports of ongoing work on the critical edition of the Arbor, but the enormous size of the book and the rich manuscript tradition mean that this work is prolonged. Thus, other forms of making the text available seem worth considering, especially as modern digital tools such as Transkibus can be of invaluable help in this regard.

References:

• Marini, A. Ubertino e Angela: l’„Arbor vitae” e il „Liber”, in: Angele de Foligno. Le dossier, ed. G. Barone, J. Dalarun, Rome 1999, pp. 319- 344
• Martinez Ruiz, C.M. Historia y processo redaccional del „Arbor vitae”, in: Ubertino da Casale. Atti del XLI convegno internazionale, Spoleto 2014, pp. 113-147
• Nockels, J. Gooding, P. Ames, S. Terras, M. Understanding the application of handwritten text recognition technology in heritage contexts: a systematicreview of Transkribus in published research, Archival Science 22 (2022), pp. 367–39
• Piotrowski, M. Natural Language Processing for Historical Texts, Toronto 2012
• Ubertino de Casali, Arbor vitae crucifixae Iesu, [reprinted] intr. Ch. T. Davies, Torino 1961

Michael Lužný, Manuscriptorium Department, National Library of the Czech Republic, Prague

Chief aim of the proposed paper is to present how digital editions are created, aggregated and curated in the Manuscriptorium Digital Library. This year Manuscriptorium enters a new phase in its long-term development, gradually transforming a “mere” digital library of written cultural heritage into a virtual research environment for both the interested public and scholars from various fields (see https://beta.manuscriptorium.com/). An inherent part of the new Manuscriptorium will be a digital-edition module – the launch of its first version being planned for this autumn. The editions, encoded in XML format based on the TEI standard, have been in preparation for several years already, and come into being in a diverse manner. The main focus, however, is on processing and aggregation of older editions, no longer protected by copyright. These can be enhanced and enriched by other features, even revised. With digitised manuscripts containing the texts correlated with the editions, their visualisation has the potential to exceed by far the original book editions; nevertheless, further manuscripts that did not serve as a basis for these editions can be correlated as well, thus presenting other textual witnesses preserved, without necessarily having to re-edit the texts. Furthermore, various referencing markup (place names, personal names, etc.), for example, can be applied to certain texts, creating another additional layer to the original editions. At the end of the presentation a closer look will be taken at the example of processing lesser-known editions of Czech Reformation tracts by Jan Sedlák (e.g. Táborské traktáty eucharistické, Brno 1918), which will demonstrate the above-mentioned principles of digital-edition aggregation in Manuscriptorium.

Monika Mansfeld, University of Łódź, Poland

It is difficult to determine precisely when early Oxford commentaries on the De sensu et sensato were composed and, consequently, how they relate to one another for several reasons. First, there is almost a dozen of Oxford commentaries on this particular work which date from around the middle of the thirteenth century. It appears they were all intended for teaching purposes, but their genres differ greatly: one encounters more or less developed expositions, glosses, the so-called dubitationes, and questions. Secondly, the majority of them remain anonymous or are attributed incorrectly to some more recognizable authors, most likely to arouse interest. Finally, at least two thirds of them seem to be interrelated to one another in a way that makes it difficult to establish the order of their origin.

In my talk, I attempt to present the complex picture of the reception of Aristotle’s De sensu et sensato in Oxford in the middle of the thirteenth century. A key focus is on the editorial aspects of the project, their strengths and limitations, and why it is important to study these commentaries more holistically than has been done before.

Petra Mutlová and Lucie Mazalová, Department of Classical Studies, Masaryk University, Brno

During his tour through Central and Northern Europe between 1451 and 1456, a famous Franciscan friar and preacher John of Capistrano exchanged several hundreds of letters with the people of various countries through which he travelled. About one hundred and fifty letters related to his actions in Bohemia and Moravia were written during the time John of Capistrano spent in and around the Czech lands (1451–1454). This corpus contains letters written by John of Capistrano, reactions to his letters addressed to him as well as a number of confraternity charters issued by him. Many of these letters are still unedited.

Following the edition of John of Capistrano’s epistolary related to Polish and Hungarian matters, a volume containing the Bohemian and Moravian correspondence is currently under preparation (hus.phil.muni.cz). The letters John of Capistrano exchanged with the Hussite “heretics” are preserved in high numbers of copies and attest to rich and intricate transmission. In our talk, we will present our current editorial project and we will discuss in detail the most lively disseminated letter from this corpus and tackle some of the editorial challenges that we have to face when editing this epistolary.

Krzysztof Nowak, Institute of Polish Language, Polish Academy of Sciences, Cracow

The Electronic Corpus of Polish Medieval Latin eFontes aims to account for the use of the
Latin language on the Polish territory during the Middle Ages. The texts to be included have
been chosen primarily for their communicative function and genre to which they belong, but
the corpus representativeness is controlled also in regard to the place and time of text
composition. Although formally synchronic, the corpus covers the years 1000-1550, which
makes for over five centuries of language use. As such, its structure necessarily reflects the
diachronic dynamics of the Polish written production.

In this paper we demonstrate how the eFontes project aims at catering
for different research needs. First, we briefly present the architecture of
the corpus. Apart from a large and roughly balanced corpus maius,
containing entire texts, we build more rigorously controlled corpus
minus, consisting of shorter texts and text samples. Known from major
corpora projects, this design reflects varying interests of the users, both
linguists and historians.

Second, we present the Editions platform which allows to consult the original editions of
texts included in the corpus (https://editiones.scriptores.pl). In this way, scholars and students
of the Middle Ages may interact with medieval works in more traditional linear form.
Third, we describe our attempts at building a community of corpus users. During the annual
project workshops, addressed to experienced scholars, we examine specific problems related
to corpus building, such as diverging text typologies, metadata curations etc. Regular
seminars of the project, on the other hand, are organized to familiarize students and scholars
with fundamental techniques of digital humanities research and corpus linguistics.

References
Hernández Campoy, Juan Manuel, and Natalie Schilling. 2014. ‘The Application of the
Quantitative Paradigm to Historical Sociolinguistics: Problems with the Generalizability
Principle’. In The Handbook of Historical Sociolinguistics, edited by Juan Manuel Hernández
Campoy and J. Camilo Conde-Silvestre, 63–79. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell.

Pavel Nývlt, Centre of Classical Studies, Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague 

the editors; in a huge majority of cases, readings of critical editions are simply accepted without checking the manuscripts. Quite often, even the editor’s warnings like sic are simply copied. However, the Dictionary has pointed to mistakes in editions several hundreds of times. In a majority of cases, these are simply typos. Less often, the dictionary takes into account manuscripts not known to the editor. Most interestingly but quite rarely, the authors of the dictionary correct the editor’s reading of a manuscript; they suggest emendations of their own (or of members of their redactorial board); or they point out that the correction proposed by the editor is unnecessary. These rare occurrences lead to the margins of Latin usage: The dividing line between the acceptable lectio difficilior on one hand, and an outrageous scribal mistake on the other, is often blurred, but this shadowy area of uncertainty is as hard to capture in the dictionary as it is in editions.

A few times during the decades of work on the Dictionary, the decision has been made not to use an edition, but to prefer the manuscript instead. New editions are always welcome, but they also pose a challenge to the lexicographers: They have to deal with new readings, some of which are not captured in their material, and to decide how many of the new editions are worth excerpting.

In the end, it needs to be stressed that the Dictionary does not lay a claim to infallibility; the lexicographers offer the editors their somewhat different perspective in the hope that the resulting dialogue will be mutually beneficial.

Jan Odstrčilík, Institut für Mittelalterforschung, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Wien

The number of digital editions of medieval texts is always growing. It is becoming something almost obligatory to include in our projects. Yet, many digital editions still look almost like printed ones. Of course, they add many bells and whistles, like displaying various versions of the text side by side and with images from the manuscripts as well. However, in many other aspects, we are still often in the realm of imitating printed books, e.g. with the critical apparatus.

In this exploratory paper, I will look at some innovative approaches to digital editions. How are they trying to make textual variants more visible and meaningful? What are they doing to make texts interconnected? What new dimensions do they add that are missing in the printed books?

However, while focusing on interactivity and hypertext aspect of digital editions, we should not forget the need to make them suitable for linear focused reading. How can this be achieved and what is often overlooked in current approaches?

This paper will not offer any definitive answers but will hopefully incite discussion on this topic.

Chantal Pivetta, Department of Italian Studies, University of Lund

I am developing a research project that will result in a digital critical edition of Uberto and
Philomena, a narration in octaves of a chivalrous subject. The work has been written around 1410
by Andrea de Simone, author of whom we have little information. It had a good circulation during
the Italian Renaissance, with a total of eight editions starting from the editio princeps (1475) to the
last printing (1533). To date, three manuscripts remain, which represent my main source of
investigation.
The text has been defined as a novellistic cantare, most likely intended for recitation in the square
in three different days. I will investigate not only the brevity of the story, which led to a series of
formal and stylistic choices, but also the relationship between orality and writing. The use of IT
tools related to Close Reading allows me to easily identify algorithms able to explain several
phenomena. The results obtained so far suggest different information on the copyists and their
choices, but at the same time they make it clear that the text was in an intermediate section, almost a
bridge, between the oral tradition of the cantari and the subsequent refined chivalric literature of the
courts.
This prompts me to consider aspects of Distant Reading as well, providing me with valuable
suggestions on the possible relationships between some cantari and subsequent works by Boiardo
and Ariosto.
My contribution will show some practices adopted within my philological and linguistic study and
the unexpected solutions that some tools can offer. This is in line with the idea that digital softwares
can help researchers (sometimes with contradictory results compared to the human work previously
conducted!). However, they cannot fully replace the researchers in their role, as naturally a human
interpretation is required.

Dorota Rojszczak-Robińska, Adam Mickiewicz University, Faculty od Polish and Classical Philology, Poznań

In the paper, I will focus on the digital editions on the example of the project „Old Polish New Testament apocrypha” (website: apocrypha.amu.edu.pl).

Apocrypha is a tool for the study of medieval Polish biblical-apocryphal narratives. It is a group of texts (altogether over 2000 manuscript pages and prints) that stand at the centre of Old Polish culture, some of which have not been published to this day. These are the largest surviving Slavic (not only Polish) medieval texts.

This tool is a database with a comprehensive search engine. The tool will be useful to researchers of various disciplines: linguists, literary scholars, medievalists, theologians, cultural studies scholars, historians and source materials experts.

The website offers transliterations and transcriptions of nine apocrypha, newly prepared for the needs of the project according to uniform rules (some of these texts have not been published in full so far).

Thanks to the fact that the Polish texts are accompanied by sources (mainly Latin, including the Bible and the writings of the Fathers of the Church) it is possible to study the reception of these cultural texts in medieval Poland. The grammatical and lexical annotation facilitates linguistic studies (e.g. research into the influence of Latin on emerging Slavic languages). Thanks to the possibility of searching by event and personal threads, it is easy to find and compare the way a given character or event is presented (e.g. Judas or the prayer in the Garden of Olives). The project is fully interdisciplinary.

The aim of the paper is not only to present the project, but also to show the relationship between digital and traditional editions, and to demonstrate the advantages and limitations of both solutions.

Daniel Sawyer, Faculty of English, University of Oxford

How do editors look at manuscripts, two decades into the third millennium? This paper lays out some opening ideas for discussion through the rest of the conference; its examples primarily come from Middle English studies, but it is hoped that the issues at play will resonate more widely.

Literary critics have a well-worked out model of canonicity, the force within an author’s reception that determines what works are read. Quirks in recent editions of Chaucer’s works invite us to think further about the role of canonicity in determining which works receive editions, but also which manuscripts receive editorial attention. Long works with large manuscript traditions often cry out most loudly for editing, yet—as, for example, in the cases of The Prick of Conscience and the Wycliffite Bible—their sheer mass also makes them especially challenging terrain for the editor.

In tackling the challenges of such large manuscript traditions, present-day editors turn to digital tools. These tools become—in fruitful ways—methods of not looking at manuscripts, working instead through abstraction and proxies. At the edges of our work, the editing of large manuscript traditions drives us to consider those manuscripts which do not survive; in a sense, this movement returns us to one of the traditional concerns of scholarly editing, which has long pursued the ghosts of now-lost books.

Finally, what of the field’s ability to secure funding, create institutional spaces, and foster future editors? Because computer use and internet access no longer require skilled tinkering, present-day students are in some ways less digitally-literate than their recent forebears. Perhaps modern editing ought to be more proactive in nurturing relevant skills. To establish and maintain institutional support, meanwhile, editors have a good, truthful story to tell about the value of our craft—but we must remember to tell it!

Gabriel Silagi, Centre for Medieval Studies, Prague

Der Beitrag berichtet aus der praktischen Editionsarbeit von der handschriftlichen Überlieferung von Hussens Hauptwerk De ecclesia und illustriert einige charakteristische Editions-Probleme, die sich bei den bisherigen Bearbeitern gezeigt haben, dabei verweist er auf die neuen technischen Möglichkeiten.

Andrea Svobodová, Department of Language Development, Czech Language Institute, Czech Academy of Sciences

Translations of the Bible – at least some of its parts – belong to the earliest Old Czech texts at all, the Psalter and the Gospel lections were translated from the very beginning of the 14th century. The complete Bible was translated into Czech for the first time in the 1350s, and by 1500 there were a total of 4 versions of the translation, the so-called redactions, and several solitary versions. Until today about a hundred of manuscripts and an equal number of manuscript fragments, and several printed editions have survived. And the large number of preserved sources raises the question of how to make them most effectively accessible, since translations of the biblical text provide rich material for linguistic research. Publishing complete redactions (either in book form or electronically) seems to be the least effective, as it is a long-distance run. Therefore, grant projects focusing on a particular biblical book or group of books provide a solution, and the ideal approach seems to be the creation of digital editions (transcripts) based on the selected sources and their progressive publication in a database that also allows their comparison.

The paper will introduce such a database: Diabible (https://diabible.ujc.cas.cz), which is being created since 2018 in the Department of Language Development of the Czech Language Institute and which so far contains the Gospels of Matthew and of Mark and the Song of Songs. By the end of the year the transcripts of the Psalter will be available, which are the by-product of the project supported by the Czech Science Foundation The First Printed Old Czech Psalter (a philological analysis and critical edition). I will therefore also touch upon the issue of the pros/cons of the traditional and modern approach to the editing of Old Czech biblical texts.

Łukasz Tomanek, Institute of Philosophy, University of Silesia in Katowice

The sententiae commentaries, popular especially in the second half of the 13th cent. not only give us a deep insight into the commenting strategies of schoolmen from the period, but also cause a large number of problems for modern editors. Two of such commentaries composed by Fernand of Spain (fl. 1290) — one on De substantia orbis of Averroes, the second on Metaphysics of Aristotle — are an illustrative example of such problems which concern the way the authoritative texts are handled by the master. The primary difficulty we face in Fernand's works is that Aristotle's and Averroes' texts are incorporated into commentary and it is usually hard to distinguish the commentary from the text commented upon. The specific editing problems concerning each of Fernand's works might be enumerated as follows:

• How to mark the presence of the authoritative text in expositio (italics, parentheses)?
• While having a fragment close to the source, though with some variations and minor additions, which criteria should be adopted to decide whether it is commented text (its other lectio known by the author) or still a commentary?
• When there is no critical edition of the commented text, and also its early modern editions are full of omissions and do not correspond with the text in the commentary, what solution is preferable: to provide a provisional edition trying to choose up to ten from numerous manuscripts that seem to be close to the text used by the author, or to simply stick to the early modern edition known and used by scholars, yet containing the text that does not correspond with both text used in the commentary and texts from manuscripts dated to the 13th cent.?

These are the difficulties which I would like to present in my paper and I hope to discuss during the conference.

Christina Traxler, Department of Historical Theology, University of Vienna

This paper presents some of the challenges that came along with editing one of the most
influential and widespread treatises against the Hussites in early 15th century: the Tractatus
contra articulos Hussitarum, compiled about 1424 by Peter of Pulkau, Bartholomäus of Ebrach
and Jacob of Clavaro on behalf of the papal legate Branda di Castiglioni (ed. by C. Traxler,
Corpus Christianorum – Continuatio Mediaevalis 305, Turnhout: Brepols Publishers 2020).
With 56 copies mostly from the 15th century still extant, the Tractatus ranges among the most
popular writings against the nascent Hussite movement. The paper discusses fundamental
challenges in editing such a widespread text (selection of manuscripts for the critical edition,
stemma codicum, missing autograph, codicological descriptions of the manuscripts etc.).
Besides that, it refers to the problem of ‘multiple authorships’ and presents theories how the
three authors might have collaborated in compiling this text or can be identified by lacking
evidence. Furthermore, it shows why the Viennese Tractatus is not a homogeneous document,
but a grown and dynamic text: The paper argues that the longest part of the treatise (arguing
against the chalice for lay people) is older than the other parts and was already written between
1414 and 1418, in a direct polemic between a Hussite (probably Jacobellus de Misa) and his
catholic opponent, and was only later added to the refutation of the other three Articles of
Prague. This composite text eventually became the Tractatus contra articulos Hussitarum
collectus in universitate Wiennensi.

The English translation of Jan Hus's De sanguine Christi glorificato

Editing illustrated fight books and its challenges

Modern medievalist: From printed edition to a database. The origins of invectivity and polemicity

Matthew of Cracow's Dialogue on Frequent Communion: Re-editing a late medieval 'bestseller'

Dialogus volatilis by Stephen of Dolany: An allegorical polemic against John Hus