The main goal of the project is to investigate the interaction between language, knowledge and scholarship in the Romance cultural sphere of the High and Late Middle Ages, where new vernacular knowledge networks develop between around 1100 and around 1500, increasingly replacing the Latin networks that had prevailed until then. The project traces this process in the medieval varieties of the Galloromania - French, Occitan and Gascon - and the Italoromania.
The growing textualization of many areas of life and the emergence of new educational institutions in the growing medieval cities, for example, catalyzed the emergence of new groups of experts, new ways of generating and transferring knowledge and thus the expansion of vernacular languages as a written medium of communication: While in Western Europe the written language until around 1150 is almost exclusively Latin, people now increasingly switch to vernacular languages. The language shift is not complete, as Latin will continue to dominate the vernacular varieties as the language of administration, education and scholarship for a very long time to come. The new vernacular forms of knowledge communication are more regional, more fragmented and sometimes only loosely connected with each other. They do not always contribute to the development of independent, innovative bodies of knowledge. They are often still dependent on Latin models and therefore often epigonal. Nevertheless, vernacular knowledge communication is an important factor in the process of further developing or even weakening the traditional, canonized and authoritatively administered bodies of knowledge of the Latin tradition.
The language change is also not abrupt but carried out in several stages, and different regions begin to write in the vernacular at different times and with varying intensity. At first glance, the transition from (Middle) Latin to the vernacular languages may appear to be a superficial phenomenon, a simple change between mutually interchangeable language varieties. From a socio-historical, cultural and genre-specific perspective, however, such an estimation is incorrect, since medieval Latin is associated with specific user groups and situations distinct from those of the vernacular languages. When vernacular varieties also became a means of conveying knowledge in writing, the knowledge networks change.
The conceptual and related conceptual development of vernacular languages, two central levels of analysis of the project, are both an indication and a stimulus of social change, in which a renewal of the intellectual landscape on the way to the Renaissance manifests itself. These technical, ‘scientific’ languages depicting knowledge and scholarship are a particularly important part of the intellectual, cultural heritage of Europe. In addition to this, the Romance languages are major carriers of a cultural exchange in the Middle Ages that starts to establish the European identity as a knowledge society.
Methods
The ALMA project specifically entangles methods of lexicology and lexicography, text philology and the history of sciences and scholarship with approaches of the Digital Humanities, Semantic Web, and ontology engineering.
1. Texteditions and Corpus: Corpuslinguistic Analysis
Using digital methods, the rich Romance tradition in the field of knowledge communication will be digitally processed for historically oriented research, and it will be made accessible through two exemplary text corpora on the domains of medicine and law. These multilingual text corpora give access to the important cultural sphere of medieval Romance speaking Europe and lay the foundation for the reconstruction of the main concepts and concept networks of the two knowledge domains. The cross-linguistic approach followed for the creation of the domain-specific, parallel corpora represents a desideratum of previous research.
The corpora contain new digital text editions of previously unedited manuscripts created by ALMA and, also, digitized text editions published in print. All texts are converted into a standardized XML/TEI format; they are tokenized, annotated and lemmatized. The corpus texts are analyzed using quantitative, empirical methods of corpus linguistics (absolute and relative frequency analysis, co-occurrence analysis) in order to generate initial findings on relevant technical terms and key concepts.
Domain of Medicine
The field of medicine plays a particularly important role as it shows significant impact of the contact with the Greek-Arab tradition introducing new groups of experts to written knowledge communication.
An example of a key text in the medical corpus are the vernacular translations of the Chirurgia magna [lt. text 1363, oldest manuscript with a French translation, 2nd third 15th c] by Gui de Chauliac (ca. 1300-1368), a physician from 14th century France who was personal physician to three popes. Contrary to what its name might suggest, the scientific impact of this work is not limited to the field of surgery.
which laid the basis of didactic surgery and became, thus, very influential until the 17th century Instead, the Chirurgia magna represents the culmination of medieval medicine, still based on ancient knowledge but introducing the transition to modern medicine at the same time: By intertwining surgery which was, at that time, a separate field from medicine, and medicine, Gui de Chauliac stands at the beginning of a more comprehensive concept of medicine that will characterize the modern discipline. Also, the Chirurgia magna represents a compilation of the entire medical and surgical knowledge of his time. The discussion of the postmortem dissection of human corpses as a medical teaching method, which many of Guy de Chauliac's contemporaries did not use, is highly significant. And thanks also to other medical innovations described int the text such as the classification of pneumonic and bubonic plague or the further development of previous wound treatment methods for bone fractures, the Chirurgia magna stays a popular textbook and manual until the 17th century and thus becomes a bridge between medieval and modern medicine.
Domain of Law
The domain of law is particularly relevant due to its centuries-long tradition of imparting vernacular and Latin legal terms and concepts.
Two of the key texts of this domain are the Assises de Jérusalem [before 1266] and the anonymous Grand coutumier de Normandie [late 13th century]. The Assises de Jérusalem are a compilation of customary law in the Latin-Christian kingdom of Jerusalem from the mid-thirteenth century. Its author was the politically very influential Jean d'Ibelin, Count of Jaffa and Ashkelon, one of the most prominent nobles of the Latin Middle East of his time. The work is of outstanding importance for several reasons:
Firstly, it is by far the most detailed of several contemporary legal texts from his cultural sphere. Secondly, the Assises de Jérusalem are considered one of the most comprehensive, if not the most comprehensive, medieval treatise on Christian-European feudal law. It also deals with formal and contentual questions of the royal court and the constitution of the kingdom and its ruling structure. Furthermore, the text is particularly relevant for the ALMA project, as it was written in French without a direct Latin model and also provides insight into the impressive reach of new vernacular knowledge networks as far as the Near East.
2. Linguistic Analysis
The results of the corpus-linguistic, statistical analysis provides the basis for the competence-linguistic elaboration of the vocabulary through the qualitative-hermeneutic approach of historical linguistics. Based on the relevant concepts and terms identified in the texts, lexical-semantic studies are developed, considering an onomasiological, concept-based perspective. These analyze the history of the concepts (histoire du concept) as well as their correlation with the history of the words (histoire du mot), across languages and in the context of the emergence of the new knowledge networks.
These studies also incorporate the findings of neighboring disciplines such as astronomy, botany, and pharmaceutics. In addition, they compare the vernacular texts with their sources in Medieval Latin and also with texts of other vernaculars such as medieval Spanish and Catalan. The lexicological work is also controlled by drawing on the lexicographical materials compiled in the historical dictionaries: lexicography of Gallo and Italo-Romania, in particular the dictionaries Dictionnaire onomasiologique de l'ancien gascon - DAG (HAdW), Dictionnaire étymologique de l'ancien français - DEAF (HAdW), Dictionnaire de l'occitan medieval - DOM (BAdW) and Lessico etimologico italiano - LEI (AdW Mainz), Französisches etymologisches Wörterbuch - FEW and Dictionnaire du moyen francais - DMF, plus Iberoromania and (Middle) Latin.
3. Comprehensive analyses of the development of knowledge networks
Based on the findings from the lexical-semantic studies, the development of vernacular knowledge networks and the development of the language will be examined and described in overarching, stand-alone studies. Potential examples are the contexts 'plague', 'anatomy', 'donation practice', etc.
4. Digital Humanities, Semantic Web and Ontology Engineering
An innovative value of the project lies in the combination of the language data-based and multi-lingual approach with the means of ontology engineering: The main goal is to transfer the historical-philological research results achieved in the project into domain-specific historicized ontologies of information science (in Web Ontology Language - OWL). These further develop the conceptual categorisation of the investigated knowledge domains into structured knowledge. As historicized ontologies, they consider the specificities of medieval explanatory patterns: They allow the breaks in continuity between medieval and modern knowledge systems to become visible, without begin obscured by anachronistic mappings. Their cross-linguistic and concept-related approach turns them into nodes for the content-oriented interlinking of research data. This extends the circle of users of these ontologies far beyond the field of Romance studies to all disciplines with a historical focus.
Linked Open Data
The corpus texts, the lexical-semantic studies, and the critical research bibliographie (ALMABibl) will be modeled as Linked Open Data in Resource Description Framework (RDF). That way, they will be made accessible for ontologie-based data queries. To create interoperabiliy, ALMA re-uses the ontologies, vocabularies and repositories that are established for the discipline and its historical-linguistic resources as (de facto-)standards for creating Linked Open Data:
- OntoLex-Lemon, Ontologies of Linguistic Annotation – OLiA for describing linguistic terms, Model for Language Annotation - MoLA for describing language, etc.,
- ontologies for place names (Geonames, Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names – TGN), person names (Virtual International Authority File – VIAF; Gemeinsame Normdatei – GND), etc.
The project will also use Linked Open Data-modeling and ALMA's historical domain ontologies for an innovative re-use of the pertinent lexicographical resources of the dictionaries DEAF, DOM and LEI (and possibly DAG) of the Academies of Sciences and Humanities.
Publications
The findings produced by ALMA will be made available to the public through various types of publication channels: syntheses of results obtained in specific research areas will be published in the form of monographs, conference proceedings or journals. A large part of the research results will be published in the project's open access online portal: the corpus texts, the lexical-semantic studies (interlinked with the online versions of the Academies' dictionaries DAG, DEAF, DOM and LEI as well as other dictionaries), the research bibliography ALMABibl and the domain ontologies.
The Linked Open Data-resources will be made accessible through a triplestore.
Copyright:
1. Visualization of the TextFactory pipeline, ALMA.
2. “Trotula”, holding a urine bottle, manuscript Wellcome Collection, London, MS. 544 [early 14th c]. Miscellanea medica XVIII. CC BY 2.0
3. „Trotula de Salerno, De passionibus mulierum“, manuscript Salerno [1544]“. Public domain.
4. Fig. of a text in eScriptorium.
5. RDF data.
