Modelling Medieval Vagueness

The project An Agile Approach Towards Computational Modeling of Historiographical Uncertainty is building a taxonomy of historiographical uncertainty. We are focusing on early medieval texts as our case studies, because they are characterised by a high degree of “high stakes” uncertainty and a varied historiography characterised by a vivid debate. The additional factor of the manuscript text-transmission ensues that also the material aspect of the textual study will be covered in our attempt to build an adaptable taxonomy of historiographical uncertainty. Computational humanities need a robust methodological platform, that can be applied to a wide variety of projects. Uncertainty in general and geographical uncertainty in particular stand as the crucial aspects of this platform. We investigate a methodology of visualising geographical locales in historical texts and their historiographies that explicitly models uncertainty in

Nothing New Under the Sun? Computational Humanities and the Methodology of History

The example of historiography shows that quantitative methods have already been part of the humanities for a long time. Such methods alone therefore cannot be constitutive of the computational humanities (CH). It is also problematic and unsustainable to conceive it as a kind of “toolbox” of quantitative methods, as it places CH outside of the methodological traditions of the humanities disciplines. Instead, we need to remember that disciplines are defined by their research objects and the research questions they tackle. This means that we need to distinguish between applied and theoretical CH, and that applied CH must be firmly placed in the methodological scope and tradition of their mother disciplines. We posit that the supposed dichotomy of qualitative and quantitative methods is fallacious: neither will quantitative methods replace qualitative approaches in history, nor are they unnecessary—they are complementary

Dead Authors and Living Saints: Community, Sanctity, and the Reader Experience in Medieval Hagiographical Narratives

In this paper, the ‘Gesta Sanctorum Rotonensium’, a ninth-century foundation legend of the Breton monastery of Redon, and the ‘Vita Geraldi’, a hagiography of St Gerald of Aurillac, serve as a point of departure for a discussion of how the experience of reading shaped early medieval communities. By realigning communal forms of hagiographic texts as media, the authors identify and analyse the parts of those texts where the meta-narrative is carefully inserted. By calling into question ideas of both authorship and audience in the hagiographical context, this paper shows how the use of topoi in those texts created a reading experience that was rooted in the local small worlds of the monastic communities and also connected them to the universal world of Christendom. Finally, the authors show that a narratological analysis of community-creation in early medieval hagiographic texts can also help us better understand how those communities experienced their relationship with God

Dead Authors and Living Saints: Community, Sanctity, and the Reader Experience in Medieval Hagiographical Narratives

In this paper, the ‘Gesta Sanctorum Rotonensium’, a ninth-century foundation legend of the Breton monastery of Redon, and the ‘Vita Geraldi’, a hagiography of St Gerald of Aurillac, serve as a point of departure for a discussion of how the experience of reading shaped early medieval communities. By realigning communal forms of hagiographic texts as media, the authors identify and analyse the parts of those texts where the meta-narrative is carefully inserted. By calling into question ideas of both authorship and audience in the hagiographical context, this paper shows how the use of topoi in those texts created a reading experience that was rooted in the local small worlds of the monastic communities and also connected them to the universal world of Christendom. Finally, the authors show that a narratological analysis of community-creation in early medieval hagiographic texts can also help us better understand how those communities experienced their relationship with God