Catherine Dehaut

Project title:  

Usuard’s Martyrology: Networks, Reception, Appropriation, and Identities, 9^th-12^th centuries

Project Summary:  

Usuard’s Martyrology is one of the most largely and widely diffused texts of the early Middle Ages. With over 200 manuscripts still available to us, its corpus constitutes a fantastic opportunity to explore the ways in which monks copied, transformed and adapted hagiographical works, in accordance with their communities’ customs and interests, and with the local cults of saints. Each exemplar also witnesses the monastic networks that existed in a given region as well as across Europe, and the wide reception of a liturgical work initially produced at St. Germain-des-Prés in the late 9^th century.

In this project I will explore this initial reception of the Martyrology between the 9^th century and the end of the 12^th century. I am interested in exploring the relationship between institutions and hagiography, as well as characterizing hagiographical networks (in line with the concept of hagiogeography), through a series of case studies based on exemplars of the Martyrology that are associated with specific monasteries. I am also looking at identifying cultural patterns in the reception of new or foreign saints’ cults, in relationship with cultural identities in this period of social, political and religious transformations.

Working with the postulate that digital humanities have the potential to overcome research paradigms in the study of medieval collections, I will be mobilizing new technologies involving artificial intelligence, such as handwritten text recognition (HTR) and the eScriptorium transcription models (https://escriptorium.inria.fr), in order to accelerate the treatment of this extensive corpus and the identification of variations across the individual manuscripts. The integration of artificial intelligence in the context of medieval studies is quite novel, and my hopes are that the methodology involved in my research will inspire further research on this rich – though largely overlooked for practical reasons – corpus of manuscripts.