Event: Medieval Intellectual History in the Digital Age

We are excited to welcome Wilfred Laurier University Professor and DRAGEN Lab Senior Research Fellow, Chris L Nighman for the first lecture in our 2023 Medieval Lecture Series. His lecture, titled “Medieval Intellectual History in the Digital Age: Mapping the Medieval Mentalité Through the Janus Intertextuality Search Engine” combines vigorous medieval study and new technologies - everything the DRAGEN Lab loves to see. Join us for his lecture on February 15, 3:30 - 5:00PM at SJ2 1002. Like all in our lecture series, this event is free to attend.

Abstract:

While developing my online critical edition of Thomas of Ireland’s Manipulus florum (2013), an influential collection of authoritative Latin proverbs and textual excerpts, I collaborated with two UW computer scientists who developed the Janus Intertextuality Search Engine, an innovative research tool that enables scholars to compare a long Latin text to the entire edition of Manipulus in a single search query.

In 2015 we added my edition of another influential medieval Latin florilegium, Liber pharetrae, to the Janus database, and then generated an intertextuality report identifying all quotations shared by these two florilegia, which are surely independent of one another.

We are currently adding to the Janus database a third influential and independent florilegium, Viridarium consolationis, creating a resource that has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of scholastic intellectual history. In a few years we will add Geremia da Montagnone’s proto-humanist Compendium moralium notabilium (c.1310), which should greatly further our understanding of intellectual continuity and discontinuity from medieval scholasticism to renaissance humanism.