The Book of Letters of Hildegard of Bingen. Genesis - Structure - Composition

• Applicants: Professorin Dr. Mechthild Dreyer; Professor Dr. Andreas Kuczera; Professor Dr. Thomas Stäcker
• Subject Area: Roman Catholic Theology
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 530755431

The object of the research project, which has been funded since March 2020, is the digital edition of the letters of the Benedictine nun and abbess Hildegard von Bingen (1098 - 1179). If one disregards the scattered tradition, these are available in six collections from Hildegard's spatial and temporal environment. Among them, the Riesenkodex (R) proves to be significant in that it contains all of Hildegard's works and has been identified in research as the "last hand edition". Consequently, the collection of letters contained in it, the Liber epistolarum, is to be regarded as the authorised version of the epistolary texts. The epistolary work of the Liber epistolarum is presented in the digital edition in two versions: a version that is faithful to the original (textus historicus) and a standardised reading version. The representation of the text as a graph via standoff properties makes it possible to generate both the "textus historicus" with text-critical annotations and the standardised reading version with the help of one and the same modelling. In addition, the graph contains annotations on the persons (actors) with their functions and associated location information as well as references to the obvious citations (sources), which can be additionally displayed in both versions. In order to enable a deeper understanding of the letter collection of the Liber epistolarum, the edition is supplemented by an analysis of all six letter collections relevant to the project, which is accentuated in terms of the history of transmission and focuses on composed collections as the dominant format of the transmission of Hildegard's letters. The graph-based edition and publication platform, which was developed in the first project phase as a web-based access to the digital edition, will be expanded in the second project phase to include a visual analysis tool. This tool makes it possible to explore the results from computer-assisted text comparisons and topic extraction in conjunction with the letter texts as well as their metadata. This allows the extracted terms to be found in the letter texts and compositional features to be annotated. The digital edition of Hildegard's letters serves as the basis for various views and export formats as well as a printed edition. All versions and editions will be published under free licences (CC BY). The book publication will be in the internationally renowned series "Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologie des Mittelalters. Neue Folge" of the Aschendorff Verlag (Münster).

• DFG Programme: Research Grants