HSP Judges: Culture and History in Comestor\u27s Historia Iudicum

As participants within the Historia Scholastica Project, ongoing since August 2011, our project joins with the larger goal of making a transcription and English translation of Boise State University’s copy of Peter Comestor’s Historia Scholastica accessible to a general English-speaking audience. Throughout the 2015-2016 academic year, we will have translated 206 lines of the “Judges” section. The goal of this translation is to preserve the fundamental ideas that Comestor conveyed through his vocabulary and grammar in our English translation while making it presentable to a contemporary English audience. Our cohort of Latin students has begun the process of transcription, textual comparison, and translation of the book of Judges, referring to Adriano Cappelli’s The Elements of Abbreviation in Medieval Latin Paleography for a transcription reference and comparing our copy with other extant texts, the Patrologia Latinae 198 and the 1543 Lugduni transcription. We have begun to identify Comestor’s sources and influences, such as Jerome and Josephus, exercising comparisons between the authors. The textual comparisons made with our research will set the stage for further analysis of the BSU manuscript within manuscript lineages of Comestor’s crucial medieval work

HSP Judges: A Template for Community Collaboration

The Fall 2016 - Spring 2017 Historia Scholastica Judges group, a team dedicated to the translation of a Medieval Latin document, explored electronic venues to make the project bridge communities across physical space through an online collaboration tool. We evaluated commonly-available platforms to select a tool with sufficient potential to facilitate future online collaborative efforts with community partners. Throughout the Spring 2017 semester, we collaborated via the platform to judge its performance. We agreed on the continued use of Google related applications, including Google Docs and Hangout. In the process, we encountered multiple issues: exigent circumstances, including snow days, classmates overseas, and former classmates likely not using their university E-mails caused many delays in the class schedule and difficulty in communication. Communication between Historia Scholastica Project (HSP) team members was frequently unclear and hangouts were difficult to conduct, with not everyone online simultaneously. The implementation of Google as a collaborative tool within HSP is on-going, initiated on a two-month trial. Results will be evaluated on criteria of communication and scheduling, with a bearing on future HSP collaborations