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Document Details : Title: Computational Approaches to the Study of Patristic Sermon Collections Author(s): SCHMIDT, Gleb Journal: Augustiniana Volume: 73 Issue: 1 Date: 2023 Pages: 139-176 DOI: 10.2143/AUG.73.1.3292390 Abstract : In patristic sermon studies, a methodology and toolbox for assisted large-scale exploration of the phenomenon of collections – ordered sequences of texts – is still an important desideratum. Collections were the primary mode of transmission in the Middle Ages for patristic preaching and have greatly influenced the corpus as it has reached us. Understanding the sermon collections brings us closer to reconstructing the original texts as they were preached in Late Antiquity and sheds light on their influence on medieval religious tradition. The ambition of this article is to fill this desideratum. It suggests several quantitative techniques, which would allow (1) assessing and quantifying similarity between sermon collections in terms of their contents and organisation, (2) navigation and meaningful grouping of the ever-increasing corpus of descriptions of sermon collections, (3) retrieving relevant material from this corpus, and (4) finding new associations between individual sermons, which might eventually lead to discoveries of the collections and groupings that have so far escaped scholarly attention. Briefly presenting the essential ideas underlying each method, the article reports the results of their application to a vast dataset recording the medieval manuscript transmission of Augustine’s sermones ad populum. The ability of the suggested methods to confirm the intuitions and observations of previous generations of scholars promises a breakthrough once the same techniques are employed to explore less-studied material, for example, the transmission of pseudepigraphic patristic sermons. |
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