CSMC Keynote Lecture: Shari Boodts

Manuscripts as Witnesses to the Cultural Contexts and Material Conditions of Textual Transmission: The MsPhys Project

Professor Dr Shari Boodts (Radboud Institute for Culture and History, Radboud University)

Medieval manuscripts are an inexhaustible source of information about the past. By their very nature, they facilitate, even encourage, modifications from copy to copy, providing a distinctive framework for knowledge dissemination and cultural evolution. New technologies have emerged that enable us to analyse medieval manuscripts from multiple perspectives. The “MsPhys” project employs a combination of AI-driven methods in computer vision, natural language processing, and sequence alignment to access and analyse the multimodal nature of medieval manuscripts, integrating three elements:

The setting in which manuscripts present their contents (layout, paratext, decoration).

The evolution of texts and the role of context-dependent adaptation.

The effect of the combination of works in a manuscript on their individual and collective interpretation.

The project analyses these mechanics of multimodality for one of the most dynamic and widespread medieval text traditions: the Physiologus and its many adaptations. This originally Greek collection of animal stories and Christian allegory was translated in over 13 languages over the course of the Middle Ages. In Latin, it transformed through numerous adaptations into the widely popular bestiaries. Extant in over 1000 manuscripts, many of them illuminated, the multi-faceted tradition of the Physiologus is a perfect example of vibrant and creative medieval reception.

Establishing a strong and mutually beneficial connection between historical and computer sciences will fundamentally expand the ways in which we use medieval manuscripts as sources. However, this synergy still faces many challenges. I hope to discuss with you the methods and questions at the centre of the “MsPhys” project, and thus get closer to unlocking transmission history as a complex and highly impactful process.