Mi contribución a este Homenaje consiste en efectuar una reflexión sobre la presencia del romancero en la vida académica de Aurelio González. El estudio del romancero atraviesa todas sus líneas de investigación desde distintos lugares de asedio al género: el romancero viejo, el romancero tradicional moderno, el romancero americano. La poética y la gramática del romancero lo preocuparon y ocuparon desde su tesis de doctorado dedicada al estudio de
las formas y funciones de los principios en el romancero viejo en 1984, hasta el romancero americano al que dedicó los últimos 20 años de su vida. Asimismo, el estudio de la tradición oral moderna lo tuvo como participante de las grandes encuestas realizadas en España a fines del siglo XX coordinadas por Diego Catalán. Estas páginas constituyen un recorrido a través de los estudios romancísticos de Aurelio González que pone de manifiesto su insoslayable contribución al campo.
La canzone Nuns ne poroit de mavaise raison (RS 1887, L 265.1222) è considerata un testo enigmatico a causa della difficoltà di identificarne con verosimiglianza l’autore, per cui sono state avanzate diverse ipotesi, anche se secondo la vulgata disporremmo di notizie precise circa la sua composizione. Essa costituisce un invito pressante, pronunciato con una franchezza rimarchevole, ai limiti della rudezza, dall’anonimo nei confronti del re Luigi IX affinché non abbandoni la Terra Santa dopo la disfatta di Fariskur del 6 aprile dello stesso anno, in seguito alla quale il re e gran parte del suo esercito furono imprigionati dai musulmani d’Egitto. Un’analisi accurata del contenuto del testo e della sua struttura, non condizionata dalla definizione di Gaston Paris risalente al 1893 il quale la etichettò da allora senza alcun dubbio come «la chanson composée à Acre en juin 1250», consente ora di avanzare una nuova ipotesi di attribuzione al grande troviere Thibaut de Champagne.
Matthias Schöffel, Esteban Garces Arias, Marinus Wiedner
et al.
Part-of-speech (POS) tagging remains a foundational component in natural language processing pipelines, particularly critical for historical text analysis at the intersection of computational linguistics and digital humanities. Despite significant advancements in modern large language models (LLMs) for ancient languages, their application to Medieval Romance languages presents distinctive challenges stemming from diachronic linguistic evolution, spelling variations, and labeled data scarcity. This study systematically investigates the central determinants of POS tagging performance across diverse corpora of Medieval Occitan, Medieval Spanish, and Medieval French texts, spanning biblical, hagiographical, medical, and dietary domains. Through rigorous experimentation, we evaluate how fine-tuning approaches, prompt engineering, model architectures, decoding strategies, and cross-lingual transfer learning techniques affect tagging accuracy. Our results reveal both notable limitations in LLMs' ability to process historical language variations and non-standardized spelling, as well as promising specialized techniques that effectively address the unique challenges presented by low-resource historical languages.
Christofer Meinecke, Estelle Guéville, David Joseph Wrisley
We aim to theorize the medieval manuscript page and its contents more holistically, using state-of-the-art techniques to segment and describe the entire manuscript folio, for the purpose of creating richer training data for computer vision techniques, namely instance segmentation, and multimodal models for medieval-specific visual content.
Michael Toker, Oren Mishali, Ophir Münz-Manor
et al.
There is a large volume of late antique and medieval Hebrew texts. They represent a crucial linguistic and cultural bridge between Biblical and modern Hebrew. Poetry is prominent in these texts and one of its main haracteristics is the frequent use of metaphor. Distinguishing figurative and literal language use is a major task for scholars of the Humanities, especially in the fields of literature, linguistics, and hermeneutics. This paper presents a new, challenging dataset of late antique and medieval Hebrew poetry with expert annotations of metaphor, as well as some baseline results, which we hope will facilitate further research in this area.
Throughout medieval Europe, Hebrew records were accepted as evidence of economic and legal activities. European archives, chanceries and cartularies are dotted with Hebrew signatures, lines of text and full-fledged documents. This article limits itself to one form of practical document that is defined, not by content, but by visual and linguistic features: Jewish bilingual charters, mainly in Latin and Hebrew. The article is an exercise in transnational history, comparing bilingual Jewish deeds from tenth- and eleventh-century Catalonia with parallel documents from thirteen-century England, fourteenth-century Germany and Austria at the turn of the fifteenth century. It analyses their bilingualism with particular attention to visuality and orality. The relationships between each pair of languages are examined using a visual criterion: the mise-en-page of the two languages on the parchment or in the book of records. Its conclusion applies as much to the tenth century as to the fourteenth century: Jews asserted their identity not by the content of their language but by the visual presence of Hebrew letters. Jews marked themselves with the Hebrew alphabet, while the content conveyed through these letters—whether in Aramaic, Hebrew, Norman-French, Catalan or German—was secondary.
El primer editor de la Fazienda de Ultramar, Moshé Lazar, fue el primero en establecer que el material bíblico de la obra provenía de un original hebreo. Para demostrar su hipótesis incluyó en su pionera edición de 1965 numerosas notas a pie estableciendo correspondencias entre determinados pasajes o palabras de la Fazienda y de la Biblia hebrea. Sin embargo, Lazar a menudo obvió aquellas partes donde la obra sigue la Vulgata, ocultando así las correspondencias entre ambas obras. En el presente artículo se demostrará que las contribuciones de la Vulgata a la Fazienda son mucho mayores de lo que se ha aceptado, sugiriendo que los pasajes del Viejo Testamento de la Fazienda provienen de dos fuentes distintas: la Biblia hebrea y la Vulgata latina.
Book review of Weikert, Katherine, and Elena Woodacre, eds. 2021. Medieval Intersections: Gender and Status in Europe in the Middle Ages. New York and Oxford: Berghahn. Pp. 132. ISBN 9781800731547.
In Christian theological history, reflecting on the relationship between intellect and the will is an ongoing process. Roughly speaking, in Medieval Christianity, two concepts were employed to clarify the relationship between intellect and the will: intellectualism defended the primary role of the intellect, and voluntarism promoted the human will as decisive. These were represented respectively by Aquinas and Duns Scotus. After presenting these concepts as interpretive frameworks, the author examines Calvin. It appears that Calvin’s metaphysical structure of the human being can be characterised as intellectualistic. Richard Muller agrees with this, but he suggests that Calvin’s soteriology was influenced by voluntarism. From the fiducial character of faith, he argues the importance of the will in the fall from grace and suggests that Calvin placed himself in the voluntaristic tradition of Scotus. In this article, Muller’s arguments are investigated and evaluated, and the conclusion is drawn that there is no ground for soteriological voluntarism in Calvin. This conclusion led the author to question whether intellectualism can be spoken of in Calvin’s soteriology. His research into this question is answered affirmatively, leading to the conclusion that Calvin is best understood from an intellectualistic point of view in both his metaphysics and his soteriology.
Contribution: Firstly, this article contributes to a historical-theological discussion of the relationship of will and reason in Calvin. Secondly, this discussion is important for a reformed anthropology. Thirdly, this historical insight is important for contemporary anthropological reflection, for example in relation to neuroscience.
Practical Theology, Practical religion. The Christian life
This article examines medieval concepts of paternity and father-son relationships through the digital analysis of medieval textual corpora. Although historians have access to enormous digital collections in 2023, they have rarely fully exploited these resources. The author proposes a historical semantic approach to this theme, using modeling tools and text mining in general, to analyze the evolution of terms related to paternity. The study proposes three conclusions: 1. a semantic break occurred in the semantic field of paternity at the turn of Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. The meaning of pater and its derivatives changed radically over the course of the 4th-6th centuries, particularly as a result of the influence of the dogma of the Christian Trinity. Medieval fatherhood was multidimensional, encompassing both biological and spiritual aspects, in other words, complex relationships between multiple carnal and spiritual (i.e. divine) fathers. 2. The role of spiritual kinship is crucial to understanding medieval fatherhood, as the work of Anita Guerreau-Jalabert and J{é}r{ô}me Baschet has already shown. Initially attributed to God, this ''ideal paternity'' (paternitas) gradually extended to members of the Church (popes, bishops, abbots), underlining at the same time the growing importance of spiritual kinship over biological kinship over the centuries studied. 3. To reveal these structures, invisible to the naked eye, an interdisciplinary approach is rigorously required. Complementary investigations into the lemmas mater, filia, frater and other family terms are required. The use of digital tools and historical semantic analysis opens up new perspectives for researchers in history, anthropology, linguistics and data mining, enabling them to explore the representation systems of ancient societies in depth and with nuance.
Not only motivated by the fact that the publication of the GAFT first appeared 60 years ago in print we reconstruct its history and so show that it is no exaggeration to claim that it has appeared already 75 years ago!
Philipp Koch, Gilary Vera Nuñez, Esteban Garces Arias
et al.
The Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities aims to digitize its Medieval Latin Dictionary. This dictionary entails record cards referring to lemmas in medieval Latin, a low-resource language. A crucial step of the digitization process is the Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) of the handwritten lemmas found on these record cards. In our work, we introduce an end-to-end pipeline, tailored to the medieval Latin dictionary, for locating, extracting, and transcribing the lemmas. We employ two state-of-the-art (SOTA) image segmentation models to prepare the initial data set for the HTR task. Furthermore, we experiment with different transformer-based models and conduct a set of experiments to explore the capabilities of different combinations of vision encoders with a GPT-2 decoder. Additionally, we also apply extensive data augmentation resulting in a highly competitive model. The best-performing setup achieved a Character Error Rate (CER) of 0.015, which is even superior to the commercial Google Cloud Vision model, and shows more stable performance.
This article focuses on the transcription of medieval manuscripts. Whereas problems of transcription have long interested medievalists, few workable options in the era of printed editions were available besides normalisation. The automation of this process, known as handwritten text recognition (HTR), has made new kinds of digital text creation possible, but also has foregrounded the necessity of theorising transcription in our scholarly practices. We reflect here on different notions of transcription against the backdrop of changing text technologies. Moreover, drawing on our own research on medieval Latin Bibles, we present general guidelines for customizing transcription schemes, arguing that they must be designed with specific research questions and scholarly end use in mind. Since we are particularly interested in the scribal contribution to the production of codices, our transcription guidelines aim to capture abbreviations and orthographic variation between different textual witnesses for downstream machine learning tasks. In the final section of the article, we discuss a few examples of how the HTR-created transcriptions allow us to address new questions at scale in medieval manuscripts, such as textual variance across witnesses, the prediction of a change in scribal hands within a single manuscript as well as the profiling of individual and regional scribal characteristics.
The study examines the palaeoclimatic background and the regional manifestations of the Medieval Climate Anomaly in the Eastern Mediterranean, with a focus on the Byzantine Empire, but also including neighbouring polities. It explores the interplay between climatic factors and the socioeconomic dynamics between the 10th and 12th centuries, concentrating on the late 10th and 11th centuries, also overlapping with the Oort Solar Minimum. In particular it contrasts scenarios of an economic boom and of an collapse of the Eastern Mediterranean created in recent scholarship for this period and evaluates these notions based on a close reading and citation of historiographical and other written sources. Thereby, both potentials as well as problems of a combination of archives of society and archives of nature become evident.
String theorists are certain that they are practicing physicists. Yet, some of their recent critics deny this. This paper argues that this conflict is really about who holds authority in making rational judgment in theoretical physics. At bottom, the conflict centers on the question: who is a proper physicist? To illustrate and understand the differing opinions about proper practice and identity, we discuss different appreciations of epistemic virtues and explanation among string theorists and their critics, and how these have been sourced in accounts of Einstein's biography. Just as Einstein is claimed by both sides, historiography offers examples of both successful and unsuccessful non-empirical science. History of science also teaches that times of conflict are often times of innovation, in which novel scholarly identities may come into being. At the same time, since the contributions of Thomas Kuhn historians have developed a critical attitude towards formal attempts and methodological recipes for epistemic demarcation and justification of scientific practice. These are now, however, being considered in the debate on non-empirical physics.
Recent event of ousting Rohingyas from Rakhine State by the Tatmadaw provoked worldwide public-and-academic interest in history and social evolution of the Rohingyas, and this is to what the article is devoted. As the existing literature presents a debate over Who are the Rohingyas?, and How legitimate is their claim over Rakhine State?, the paper reinvestigates the issues using a qualitative research method. Compiling a detailed history, the paper finds that Rohingya community developed through historically complicated processes marked by invasions and counter-invasions. The paper argues many people entered Bengal from Arakan before British brought people into Rakhine state. The Rohingyas believe Rakhine State is their ancestral homeland and they developed a sense of Ethnic Nationalism. Their right over Rakhine State is as significant as other groups. The paper concludes that the UN must pursue solution to the crisis and the government should accept the Rohingyas as it did the land or territory.
This paper is a comparison of two theories of the probability of a history in quantum mechanics. One is derived from Copenhagen quantum mechanics using the projection postulate and is the basis of the "consistent histories" interpretation; the other is based on a proposal by Bell, originally for the "pilot state" theory but here applied to pure unitary quantum mechanics. The first can be used for a wider class of histories but depends on the projection postulate, or "collapse", which is widely held to be an unsatisfactory feature of the theory; the second can be used in a theory of the universal state vector without collapse. We examine a simple model based on Wigner's friend, in which Bell's model and the projection postulate give different probabilities for the histories of a sentient system. We also examine the Frauchiger-Renner extension of this model, in which comparison of the two calculations of histories throws light on the contradiction found by Frauchiger and Renner. By extending the model to equip the observer with a memory, we reduce the probability of histories to the use of the Born rule at a single time, and show that the Born rule, with the memory, gives the same result as applying projection in the course of the history, because of entanglement with the memory: entanglement implements collapse. We discuss the implications of this for the use of histories in quantum cosmology.
One of the defining representations of women from medieval times is in the role of peace-weaver, that is, a woman was expected to 'weave' peace between warring men. The underlying assumption in scholarship on this topic is that female mediation lessens male violence. This stance can however be questioned since it may be the result of gender-based peace and diplomacy models that relegate women's roles to that of conduits between men. By analyzing the concept of communicability and relevance of certain nodes in complex networks we show how our sources afford women more complex and nuanced social roles. As a case study we consider a historical narrative, namely Bede's "Ecclesiastical History of the English People", which is a history of Britain from the first to eighth centuries AD and was immensely popular all over Europe in the Middle Ages.