The internal structure of medieval Latin legendaries: a computational analysis

Abstract

Since the middle of the 17th century, scholars have been systematically describing numerous medieval manuscripts preserved in libraries and religious institutions that contain hagiographic texts, that is texts recounting the lives of saints. In this article, we apply quantitative tools to the resulting database to consider these codices from a new point of view. As such, we study their internal organization, that is the order in which their texts are arranged. We first present a visualization tool that allows to grasp this structure at a glance. Then, we describe a model to automatically classify manuscripts according to their internal organization, based on a constrained spline regression. The results of this classification task make it possible to identify the manuscripts that have a particular internal organization, called per circulum anni (following the course of the year), and thus to study their properties. Furthermore, they open the possibility to obtain clues regarding the origin of some codices and potential kinship links between them.