Acknowledgements and practicalities

This book took a long time to come to fruition. Back in 2010, I started to contemplate the idea of studying the relationship between Latin and science, especially linguistically, a topic that had previously hardly been tackled at all. Over time I realised that such linguistic study cannot meaningfully be done without first studying the changing approaches to what science is during the long cultural dominance of Latin in Western Europe. This led to the first two parts of this book. At the time, there were no open tools for corpus linguistic studies of serious amounts of Latin text in existence, which is why I started the Corpus Corporum project (http://www.mlat.uzh.ch) in 2012 – an open full-text Latin repository able to process texts in the standard TEI xml format. It automatically lemmatises every Latin word and adds grammatical information such as parts of speech to it. A COST grant (IS1005) enabled me to initiate the project, and I thank the Chair of Mediaeval Latin in Zurich for supporting the ongoing running costs of Corpus Corporum. Its software was initially developed by Max Bänziger and is now being developed further by Jan Ctibor (University of Prague); the project is ongoing and by now collaborating with many other scholarly institutions. It has grown into the largest Latin text repository in existence, with more than 8,500 texts and 165 million words. Corpus Corporum provided much of the input data used in this book, especially in part 3. During this long time, I have studied, learned, taught, and worked at the Seminar for Mediaeval Latin of the University of Zurich (since 2014 part of the Department for Greek and Latin Philology). My warm thanks are due to these institutions and especially to my late teacher Peter Stotz, who read an early version of the book and suggested improvements, and to the current Chair of Mediaeval Latin, Carmen Cardelle de Hartmann; they both provided me with the ideal environment for such long-term in-depth studies – something that is becoming increasingly rare in today’s fast-paced university environment. This study was accepted as a habilitation thesis in Latin philology in 2021 at the University of Zurich. Further thanks are due to the reviewers – Martin Korenjak (Innsbruck) and a further anonymous reviewer of the habilitation commission – as well as to the commission itself, consisting of Carmen Cardelle de Hartmann, Ulrich Eigler, Philipp Sarasin, and Paul Widmer. The importance of institute research libraries where relevant literature about authors and works can be found together in one place – an institutional structure now regrettably to be abolished in Zurich – for writing a book like the present one can hardly be emphasised too much. I profited greatly from the existence of the Mediaeval Latin and classics libraries at the University of Zurich. There is still a long way to go before a fully digital world of scholarship might be able to provide similar aids in these fields. I have also re-