Knowledge Networks in Medieval Romance Speaking Europe

Between the 12th and 15th centuries Romance languages such as Old French, Occitan, Old Catalan and Old Italian played a leading role in medieval knowledge (science) communication, acting as transmitters of Arabic learning to every part of Europe. The project aims to investigate the interaction between language and knowledge (science). The field of observation is the Romance cultural area, in which, between approximately 1100 and 1500, new vernacular knowledge networks emerged. The project traces how in new, technically and conceptually complex fields medieval Italian, French, Occitan, Catalan and Spanish were developed into languages of knowledge (science). By focusing on these “knowledge‑languages” the project not only brings an important component of Europe’s cultural heritage into view, but also highlights the Romance languages as important vehicles of cultural exchange that helped to shape a European identity as a knowledge society in the Middle Ages. 

The project “ALMA – Wissensnetze in der mittelalterlichen Romania” (Knowledge Networks in Medieval Romance Speaking Europe) specifically combines methods from linguistics, textual philology and the history of knowledge with Digital Humanities technologies and ontology engineering. Using the latest digital methods, the rich Romance transmission tradition in the field of knowledge communication will be systematically documented and made available digitally for historical research in two exemplar text corpora – one for medicine and one for law. These corpora of texts on single languages open up a significant cultural space of the medieval Romance-speaking world and form the basis for the reconstruction of the central concepts and conceptual networks of the knowledge domains. 

A further innovative aspect lies in linking the language‑data‑driven, monolingual approach with ontology‑engineering tools: a core aim is to transfer the historical‑philological results of the project into domain‑specific, historicised ontologies. The project will also use the ontologies for the innovative reuse of relevant lexicographical resources from other academic projects, such as the “Dictionnaire onomasiologique de l’ancien gascon” (DAG), “Dictionnaire étymologique de l’ancien français” (DEAF), “Dictionnaire de l’occitan medieval” (DOM) and the “Lessico etimologico italiano” (LEI).