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Abstract

This paper aims to explore the function of Byzantine book epigrams as sources of insights into the mentality and identity of persons and communities that shaped Southern Italian book culture between the 10th and 13th centuries.
While Italo-Greek manuscript production was mainly connected to monastic settings, secular clergy and laymen were also involved, albeit less frequently, in the material realization of codices. A glimpse into the motivations and socio-cultural identity of these individuals is offered by Byzantine book epigrams, i.e. metrical paratexts located at the thresholds of manuscripts.

Within these poems, scribes occasionally left traces of their engagement with manuscripts by recording personal details such as names, offices and designations. These occurrences are especially noteworthy because, as recently noted by I. Hutter (2023), anonymity was the standard condition for Italo-Greek scribes, especially in monastic contexts. Therefore, explicit self-identification stands out as a deliberate and meaningful act, potentially reflecting individual aspirations, or an intimate form of intellectual connection between the scribes and the content of the manuscripts they copied.

This paper seeks to demonstrate how metrical paratexts can contribute to a deeper understanding of the profile of Italo-Greek scribes. Drawing on data and metadata stored in the “Database of Byzantine Book Epigrams” (DBBE), I will perform a textual and contextual examination of selected book epigrams featured in Southern Italian manuscripts that are rich in prosopographical information. The goal is to reconstruct the socio-cultural identity of scribes and to shed light on the personal motivations that shaped their self-representation within these poems.

Practical information

This lecture will be given at the “2nd International PROSOPON Workshop“, which takes place in Munich on 10-12 December 2025.

Date & time: to be confirmed

Location: University of Munich

Abstract

I will discuss the typologies developed by two digitally-oriented projects from the University of Ghent, EVWRIT and DBBE, for organising, categorising, and describing documentary and literary historical textual material in Greek. The EVWRIT (Everyday Writing in Graeco-Roman and Late Antique Egypt. A Socio-Semiotic Study of Communicative Variation) project focuses on Greek documentary texts, examining their external features to uncover social meaning in the communicative and administrative contexts of the Ptolemaic, Roman, and Byzantine periods. Its main goal is to illuminate the relationship between form and content in these historical texts, providing a multi-aspect and well-structured framework for analysis. Meanwhile, the Database of Byzantine Book Epigrams (DBBE) stores and presents metrical paratexts found in the margins of medieval Greek manuscripts, primarily focusing on original texts and scribal choices, while grouping and linking them to their edited versions. The DBBE focuses heavily on metadata, contextualising the texts through details of their production (date, place, manuscript, etc.) and also their handling by secondary literature, if present. By comparing the typologies used in both projects, I will highlight different approaches in structuring and presenting historical textual data, showcasing how they can offer equally valuable insights.

Practical information

This lecture will be given at the Typology workshop, organised by the grammateus project at the University of Geneva on 21-22 March 2025. See the full programme here.

Date & time: Saturday 22 March 2025, 15:50

Location: Amphithéâtre 012A – Battelle D (Route de Drize 7, 1227 Carouge)

Abstract

Manuscripts are no longer studied as purely textual witnesses in a bottom-up approach as in stemmatological philology, but also as physical objects. Current computational developments enable new top-down approaches. Graph databases visualise in an intuitive way complex relationships between chunks of data, coming from – in our case – metrical paratexts of the Database of Byzantine Book Epigrams (Ricceri et al. 2023). We carried out a pilot-study in which we clustered 200 occurrences of the same epigram based on textual differences and linguistic annotations (Swaelens et al. 2024). This already revealed complex relationships in the graph representation between clusters of texts, triggering scholars to dive deeper into the reasons why they are grouped. The current paper explores how a graph-based approach can present even more intricate connections between manuscripts by adding metadata (date, place, scribe) to the textual data. A qualitative analysis of both bottom-up and top-down approaches reveals that they complement each other and provide researchers with new perspectives.

Practical information

This lecture will be given at the “International Medieval Congress”, organised by the Institute for Medieval Studies at the University of Leeds. IMC 2025 will take place from Monday 07 July to Thursday 10 July 2025.

Date & time: Wednesday 9 July 2025, 14:15

Location: Leeds

More information about this conference and the full programme can be found here.

This lecture will be given at the ‘Séminaire Cultures anciennes et temporalités 2024-2025″, organised by The Research Center HiSoMA (Histoire et Sources des Mondes Antiques).

Date & time: Friday 21 Feruary 2025, 9:30-12:30

Location: Maison de l’Orient et de la Méditerranée Jean Pouilloux (86 rue Pasteur – Lyon 7e), Salle Reinach (4e étage)

More information can be found here.

Abstract

In today’s landscape of language technology, dominated by large language models, tasks like part-of-speech tagging and lemmatisation receive less attention in current NLP research. However, these tasks still pose significant challenges, especially for under-resourced, morphologically rich languages like Ancient Greek. Our project focuses on the verbatim transcriptions of Byzantine marginal poetry stored in the Database of Byzantine Book Epigrams (DBBE). Due to the highly interconnected nature of the poems, we aim to eventually perform similarity detection across the corpus. As a first step, we sought to annotate the DBBE with part-of-speech tags, morphological analyses, and lemmas. Although research on these tasks dates back to more straightforward rule-based systems from the 1970s, current taggers struggle with these unedited texts. The inconsistent orthography — largely due to itacism — adds to this complexity. To mitigate these issues, we trained a transformer-based language model encompassing classical, medieval, and modern Greek. Our experiments, however, revealed that fine-tuning the model for each annotation task was not always fruitful. There is a growing tendency to address such challenges with a multi-task head, allowing the model to process multiple annotations concurrently, drawing inspiration from cognitive psychology. This raises the question: will this more intricate solution outshine the seemingly more transparent methods of the past?

Practical information

This lecture will be given at the Computational Humanities Research Group Seminar Series, organised by the Department of Digital Humanities of King’s College London.

Date & time: Tuesday 10 December 2024, 4:00 pm

Location: Bush House, Strand Campus (30 Aldwych, London) & online

More information about this conference and the full programme can be found here.

Abstract

Formulaicity is a widely discussed concept in the study of historical Greek, primarily due to the influence of the Homeric epics, where it is traditionally understood to arise from oral contexts where formulaic sequences reduce processing effort during lengthy recitations. Besides that, formulaic language also appears in entirely written contexts, such as post-classical Greek administrative and legal documents, where high standardisation meets the need of accuracy and efficiency (see e.g. Nachtergaele 2023; Saradi 2019). The corpus I focus on, Byzantine book epigrams — short, metrical texts found in the margins of Byzantine manuscripts — presents a unique case. These paratexts, embedded in the medieval manuscript tradition, blend literary and documentary functions without any oral performance context, oscillating between practical precision and creative expression. This paper explores a methodological challenge in studying formulaic language within historical Greek corpora, focusing specifically on the Database of Byzantine Book Epigrams.

Even recent comprehensive research on Homer’s formulaic language (Bozzone 2024) relies on modern editions of the Homeric epics that attempt to reconstruct an ‘archetype’ based on medieval manuscript ‘witnesses’. In contrast, the DBBE diverges from strict adherence to traditional editorial practices by presenting epigrams preserving all original scribal choices (‘Occurrences’) while also offering ‘normalised’ versions (‘Types’) that group similar instances of the originals (Ricceri et al. 2023). This raises questions: To what extent can we rely on edited texts to analyse formulaicity? How might editorial choices, driven by the desire for a cohesive text, obscure the original variability of formulaic sequences? Does the interaction between formulaicity and editorial practices facilitate research, or does this create the impression of greater fixedness in formulae, potentially skewing certain aspects of the analysis?

This paper explores the potential impact of editorial intervention on formulaicity research, advocating for a more flexible methodology that balances the use of both edited and original sources. Through a case study on supplications for salvation within a subset of the DBBE corpus, I will demonstrate how formulaic expressions function in this hybrid referential-poetic (cf. Jacobson 1960) context, and how editorial practices may shape our understanding of formulaicity. Ultimately, this study seeks to position this material within the broader framework of formulaicity research and to discuss the implications of editorial practices for linguistic research in historical corpora.

Practical information

This lecture will be given at the conference ‘Formulaic Language in Historical Linguistics: data, methods, tools, and theory’, organised on 2-3 June 2025 by the Academy of Finland project “The learning of Latin in the 8th to 12th century: a linguistic approach to medieval Latin literacies” in collaboration with the Classical Philological Society of Finland.

Date & time: Monday 2 June 2025, 16:40

Location: Tieteiden talo (Kirkkokatu 6, Helsinki, Finland)

More information about this conference and the full programme can be found here.

Abstract

Antique literature survived thanks to scribes painstakingly copying texts from one manuscript to the other, prior to the art of printing. Occasionally, these scribes added metrical paratexts to the manuscripts, i.e. texts standing next to the main text (Genette, 1987) and introduced in Byzantine scholarship by Lauxtermann (2003) as book epigrams. Ghent University’s Database of Byzantine Book Epigrams (Ricceri et al., 2023) stores more than 12,000 of such epigrams, being verbatim transcriptions precisely as they are found in the manuscripts. This entails that the Greek of these epigrams is interspersed with orthographic inconsistencies, mainly due to phonetic changes like the itacism. These verbatim transcriptions are called occurrences and are grouped under one or more so-called types, a readable representation of its occurrences in standardised, classical Greek. Eventually, we aim to develop a dynamic system to group hemistichs, verses and epigrams based on distinct similarity measures in order for scholars to find all kinds of similar texts instead of only the ones that pop up in their mind. While developing those similarity measures, just like any other algorithm, evaluation is an essential part of the development process. However, a gold standard for the evaluation of verse similarity measures does not exist. At this point, we already conducted a pilot study on pairwise annotation of 2 verses with 10 annotators. Each verse was set off alongside six pairs of verses, of which the annotator had to mark the most similar one in their opinion. The inter-annotator agreement (IAA) yielded an agreement score of 57.69%, which is seen as a moderate agreement (Landis & Koch, 1977). This agreement score is the arithmetic mean of the agreement between each pair of annotators, as all annotators annotated the exact same set of verses. Despite the rather modest size of this pilot study, it is possible to unravel the distinct lines of reasoning of the annotators. They did not receive detailed instructions for the annotation process, because of which every annotator was free to have their own focal point. The most remarkable of those focal points was the metre. One of the annotators based their judgement on the amount of syllables a verse counts. The majority, however, seemed to take syntax as a decisive factor to determine the most similar verse; semantics were only deciding, if the syntax of both options was identical. While the gold standard is being annotated, we already started computing similarity between words. These similarities will, in a next stage, be used to compute similarity between (half) verses. The main goal of the experiment is to find out whether transformer embeddings take into account enough context to find identical or similar words with deviant orthography.

Practical information

This lecture will be given at the ‘Computational Approaches to Ancient Greek and Latin Workshop’, organised by KU Leuven and the University of Groningen. This workshop series started in 2021 with the aim of further exploring the potential of computational approaches (Natural Language Processing) applied to Ancient Greek and Latin. The 2024 edition will be held hybridly on November 28th and 29th, 2024.

Date & time: Friday 29 November 2024, 13:45-14:30

Location: KU Leuven: Mgr. Sencie Instituut (Erasmusplein 2, 3000 Leuven, Belgium) & online

Register via this link. Registration for in-person attendance is not possible anymore. The deadline for registration for online attendance is 27 November 2024.

More information about this conference and the full programme can be found here.