Papers by Bastien Dubuisson
Kurtrierisches Jahrbuch, 62, 2022
Moyen Age: Revue d'Histoire et de Philologie, 2021
Hemecht: Zeitschrift für Luxemburger Geschichte, 2021
Hémecht. Revue d'histoire luxembourgeoise / Zeitschrift für Luxemburger Geschichte, 2022
The Marienthal homiliarium-legendarium represents a unique example of a Latin hagiographical coll... more The Marienthal homiliarium-legendarium represents a unique example of a Latin hagiographical collection from the early period of the Ordo fratrum Praedicatorum originating from a nunnery. In addition, it is a rare example of a 'traditional' Dominican hagiographical collection unlike the abbreviated collections written during the 13th century by members of the Dominican Order, which redefined the landscape of Latin hagiographical edition.
Based on a detailed codicological study as well as an analysis of the texts contained in the legendarium section of the factice codex, this article questions the context of production and use of the book object. A key point is whether the legendarium was the product of a Dominican enterprise or not. The detailed study of the literary tradition of several of the texts also sheds light on the provenance of the collection.
As a book belonging to a young female community of the Order, the homiliarium-legendarium also raises questions about the history of the conventual library and of its concrete use by the nuns. Like other manuscripts, it could be linked to the prioress Yolanda of Vianden whose life story is not unlike that of the saints in the legendarium.
Analecta Bollandiana, 2021
The Life of Bishop Marus of Trier (5th c.) is little known, apart from a few snippets of informat... more The Life of Bishop Marus of Trier (5th c.) is little known, apart from a few snippets of information transmitted in the Gesta Treverorum (ca 1100). Only a brief miraculous account from the beginning of the 16th c. provides some additional details on the character, limited however to his qualities as an intercessor. The discovery of a previous witness to this work in the Sanctilogium of Jean Gie- lemans of the Abbey of the Rouge-Cloître makes it possible to re-evaluate its dating. The investigation into the genesis and transmission of this text (the edition of which is given in the appendix) is an opportunity to deal with a lesser-known period of Trevirian hagiography and to address the question of the existence of a Life of the bishop.
Des saints et des livres: Christianisme flamboyant et manuscrits hagiographiques du Nord à la fin du Moyen Âge (XIIIe-XVIe siècles), 2021
Le grand légendier de l’abbaye bénédictine de Saint-Maximin de Trèves constitue l’une des plus am... more Le grand légendier de l’abbaye bénédictine de Saint-Maximin de Trèves constitue l’une des plus amples collections hagiographiques latines compilées à l’époque médiévale. Largement exploités par les philologues pour les textes qu’ils renferment, ses volumes n’avaient pourtant jamais été étudiés pour eux-mêmes. Produit dans le second quart du xiiie siècle à une époque marquée par un nouveau dynamisme au sein de l’abbaye, le grand légendier s’inscrit dans une campagne manuscrite beaucoup plus large. Toutefois, l’étude des manuscrits ne peut s’astreindre à l’époque de leur genèse : ayant subi plusieurs transformations au cours des deux derniers siècles du Moyen Âge et au début des Temps modernes, les huit volumes subsistants de la collection sont le reflet des entreprises de gestion des livres menées par les moines qu’une contextualisation historique permet de mieux appréhender tout en jetant un regard neuf sur le légendier.
Scriptorium, 2020
FR: Au XIIe siècle, les moines de l’abbaye bénédictine de Saint-Maximin de Trèves élaborèrent un ... more FR: Au XIIe siècle, les moines de l’abbaye bénédictine de Saint-Maximin de Trèves élaborèrent un catalogue des livres contenus dans leur armarium. Plusieurs ouvrages y référencés furent réunis pour former un recueil factice. Ultérieurement, des éléments furent ajoutés, enlevés et déplacés, pour finalement aboutir à la constitution de deux manuscrits distincts, aujourd’hui conservés à Gand et à Berlin. En prenant appui sur une étude codicologique, le fil de ces opérations d’assemblage est restitué grâce à une table des matières et la mise en évidence d’extraits du De divinis officiis de Rupert de Deutz. Ce dossier illustre non seulement les pratiques de conservation des livres, mais s’attarde également sur leur emploi, en particulier celui des lectures hagiographiques.
EN: In the 12th century, the monks of the Benedictine abbey of St Maximin near Trier compiled a catalogue of the books in their armarium. Several of the works that are referenced were joint to form a composite collection. Subsequently, elements were added, removed and relocated, resulting in two separate manuscripts, which are now kept in Ghent and Berlin. Based on a codicological study, these assembly operations are reconstructed with the help of a table of contents and the identification of abstracts of Rupert of Deutz’ De divinis officiis. This case study illustrates the practices of book preservation and usage, in particular regarding hagiographic readings.
Talks by Bastien Dubuisson
Old Books and New Technologies: Medieval Books and the Digital Humanities in the Low Countries, Royal Library of Belgium (KBR), 2021
La dernière décennie du 20e siècle fut marquée par la mise en place d’un outil devenu indispensab... more La dernière décennie du 20e siècle fut marquée par la mise en place d’un outil devenu indispensable aux historiens qui étudient l’hagiographie latine d’avant 1500 et qui s’intéressent à ses vecteurs manuscrits. Née de l’initiative visionnaire de Guy Philippart et de son équipe, ainsi que d’une collaboration avec la Société des Bollandistes, la base de données BHLms entendait rendre la Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina et ses Supplementa, couplés à l’ensemble des catalogues de manuscrits hagiographiques bollandiens, instantanément interrogeables . Deux décennies plus tard, le projet est toujours vivace et s’apprête à connaître une seconde vie sur les serveurs de l’Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes .
Cependant, si les informations collectées, présentées sous la forme d’une interface graphique, permettent à tout utilisateur d’obtenir rapidement des renseignements sur un texte donné (identifié par un n° BHL) et les manuscrits qui le contiennent, les données brutes de la base n’avaient à ce jour jamais été exploitées de façon globale. C’est une analyse de ce genre que nous proposons ici, par le biais de méthodes quantitatives, et notamment d’outils d’apprentissage automatique (machine learning) .
Pour ce faire, nous embrassons deux approches, qui considèrent la base de données globales sous deux angles de vue différents. D’une part, nous enquêtons sur le degré de similarité entre les manuscrits sur la base de leur contenu, à l’aide de techniques de partitionnement (clustering). D’autre part, nous étudions les relations qu’entretiennent entre eux les saints par le truchement de méthodes de fouille de règles d’association (rule mining) et de théorie des graphes.
Si le but final de notre analyse est bel et bien d’appliquer ces méthodes à l’ensemble de la base, nous aborderons dans un premier temps un cas d’étude concret, celui des manuscrits hagiographiques et des saints de l’ancien diocèse de Trèves. Les résultats de l’analyse quantitative peuvent ainsi être confrontés aux conclusions qualitatives obtenues par l’historiographie.
III International Congress for Young Researchers in Middle Ages: Death, University of Evorà, Portugal, 2020
At the dawn of Reformation and the religious tensions that spread across Europe in the 16th centu... more At the dawn of Reformation and the religious tensions that spread across Europe in the 16th century, the German city of Trier was the theatre of a particular religious craze considered a peak in the development of personal piety.
During his second stay in the Mosellan city in 1512, emperor Maximilian of Habsburg ordered the clergy to excavate the tunica Christi, a relic that had remained buried under the main altar of the eastern choir of the cathedral since the end of the 12th century. This inventio was followed by a series of ostensiones to show the Holy Tunic to the mass of people gathered in front of the cathedral. Being located on the pilgrimage route to Aachen and Cologne, the churches of Trier took advantage of the influx of pilgrims to promote their own places of worship. A real “flood of relics” (“Heiltumsflut”) fell upon the city with all the drifts that went with it such as the digging of bones and a massive consumption of indulgence letters, a lucrative activity heavily criticized by Martin Luther a few years later.
In this context, a whole literature related to these ostensiones reliquiarum as well as to the history of the city and of its churches emerged (so-called Heiltumsschriften), the most notorious example being Johannes Enen’s “Medulla Gestorum Trevirensium”, a vernacular treaty published in 1514, with a second edition in 1515. Two years later, in 1517, a Latin version of the above-mentioned text was released (“Epitome alias medulla Gestorum Trevirorum”). Its author was Johannes Scheckmann, a monk from the Benedictine abbey of St Maximin who had already published four other prints and is believed to be behind a series of hagiographic texts preserved in manuscript form only.
Traditionally, Heilthumsbücher can be defined as printed brochures containing textual and visual information necessary for pilgrims to follow the exhibition ceremony of relics in a particular church. Yet, Scheckmann’s publications intrigue by their prosaic developments that lay far beyond the literary limits of their counterparts.
Acting as a true hagiographer, the monk of Saint-Maximin shaped a new form of compendium by reemploying a classical hagiographical repertory, including one of the two only preserved medieval treaties about the cult of the saints and the worship of their relics: Thiofrid of Echternach’s Flores Epytaphii Sanctorum (ca. 1100).
My paper’s proposal aims to explore to which extend Scheckmann’s work takes place in the context of an increased competition between sanctuaries to attract pilgrims; it also analysis the intended message of his writings in consideration with the past literature about the local saints.
Université de Namur - Atelier de la recherche virtuel PraME (26/01/21)
Bastien Dubuisson, « L’hag... more Université de Namur - Atelier de la recherche virtuel PraME (26/01/21)
Bastien Dubuisson, « L’hagiographie latine dans le diocèse de Trèves à la veille de la Réforme. L’exemple de l’abbaye bénédictine de Saint-Maximin »
Historians who aspire to explore texts with the help of the computer are more than often confront... more Historians who aspire to explore texts with the help of the computer are more than often confronted to the absence of machine-readable corpora to suit their needs. As such, the early 16th century Latin treaties about the city of Trier and its relics by the Benedictine monk Johannes Scheckmann are no exception. Despite their historical importance, among others for the study of the religious phenomenon during this pivotal era, these texts remain in their original form.
Optical Character Recognition software makes it possible to overcome this gap by translating printed or handwritten characters into encoded glyphs, but not at any cost. Creating a digital corpus requires a careful reflection, particularly when it comes to small scale projects. Moreover, Latin being a highly inflected language, further post-processing steps such as tokenization and lemmatization are necessary in order to finally be able to process a corpus of texts with lines of code. During the digital transformation, each step leads to a profound but necessary modification of the original text and the creation of new data.
The example of Scheckmann’s works illustrates what is lost when a text is turned into bits, as well as what can be discovered once the machine reads.
Poster presentation at the "ManuSciences'19" Spring School in Fréjus, 2019
Intervention lors de la deuxième journée du colloque international "Les manuscrits hagiographique... more Intervention lors de la deuxième journée du colloque international "Les manuscrits hagiographiques du nord de la France et de la Belgique actuelle à la fin du Moyen Âge (XIVe-XVIe s.) : fabrication, fonctions et usages", Université de Namur, 21 mars
Troisième séance du séminaire "Questes": Bibliothèques, lecteurs, lectures du Moyen Âge, 15 février, 2019
Conferences by Bastien Dubuisson
Der Arbeitskreis für hagiographische Fragen widmet sich seit 1994 der interdisziplinären und inte... more Der Arbeitskreis für hagiographische Fragen widmet sich seit 1994 der interdisziplinären und internationalen Vernetzung von Forschung, die sich unter anderem mit der Hagiographie, den Heiligen, der Materialität des Sakralen, der Liturgie und religiösen Praxen in Zusammenhang mit dem Kult befassen. Die Fragestellungen, mit denen sich der Arbeitskreis beschäftigt, gehören dabei den Geschichts- und Literaturwissenschaften, der Theologie und Kirchengeschichte, der Kunstgeschichte und Archäologie, der Religionswissenschaft und Anthropologie an.
Das diesjährige Arbeitstreffen bietet jüngeren ForscherInnen und etablierten WissenschaftlerInnen eine Plattform zum Austausch und zur Diskussion ihrer wissenschaftlichen Vorhaben. Forschende und Interessierte an hagiographischen Fragen sind eingeladen, an der Tagung teilzunehmen.
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Papers by Bastien Dubuisson
Based on a detailed codicological study as well as an analysis of the texts contained in the legendarium section of the factice codex, this article questions the context of production and use of the book object. A key point is whether the legendarium was the product of a Dominican enterprise or not. The detailed study of the literary tradition of several of the texts also sheds light on the provenance of the collection.
As a book belonging to a young female community of the Order, the homiliarium-legendarium also raises questions about the history of the conventual library and of its concrete use by the nuns. Like other manuscripts, it could be linked to the prioress Yolanda of Vianden whose life story is not unlike that of the saints in the legendarium.
EN: In the 12th century, the monks of the Benedictine abbey of St Maximin near Trier compiled a catalogue of the books in their armarium. Several of the works that are referenced were joint to form a composite collection. Subsequently, elements were added, removed and relocated, resulting in two separate manuscripts, which are now kept in Ghent and Berlin. Based on a codicological study, these assembly operations are reconstructed with the help of a table of contents and the identification of abstracts of Rupert of Deutz’ De divinis officiis. This case study illustrates the practices of book preservation and usage, in particular regarding hagiographic readings.
Talks by Bastien Dubuisson
Cependant, si les informations collectées, présentées sous la forme d’une interface graphique, permettent à tout utilisateur d’obtenir rapidement des renseignements sur un texte donné (identifié par un n° BHL) et les manuscrits qui le contiennent, les données brutes de la base n’avaient à ce jour jamais été exploitées de façon globale. C’est une analyse de ce genre que nous proposons ici, par le biais de méthodes quantitatives, et notamment d’outils d’apprentissage automatique (machine learning) .
Pour ce faire, nous embrassons deux approches, qui considèrent la base de données globales sous deux angles de vue différents. D’une part, nous enquêtons sur le degré de similarité entre les manuscrits sur la base de leur contenu, à l’aide de techniques de partitionnement (clustering). D’autre part, nous étudions les relations qu’entretiennent entre eux les saints par le truchement de méthodes de fouille de règles d’association (rule mining) et de théorie des graphes.
Si le but final de notre analyse est bel et bien d’appliquer ces méthodes à l’ensemble de la base, nous aborderons dans un premier temps un cas d’étude concret, celui des manuscrits hagiographiques et des saints de l’ancien diocèse de Trèves. Les résultats de l’analyse quantitative peuvent ainsi être confrontés aux conclusions qualitatives obtenues par l’historiographie.
During his second stay in the Mosellan city in 1512, emperor Maximilian of Habsburg ordered the clergy to excavate the tunica Christi, a relic that had remained buried under the main altar of the eastern choir of the cathedral since the end of the 12th century. This inventio was followed by a series of ostensiones to show the Holy Tunic to the mass of people gathered in front of the cathedral. Being located on the pilgrimage route to Aachen and Cologne, the churches of Trier took advantage of the influx of pilgrims to promote their own places of worship. A real “flood of relics” (“Heiltumsflut”) fell upon the city with all the drifts that went with it such as the digging of bones and a massive consumption of indulgence letters, a lucrative activity heavily criticized by Martin Luther a few years later.
In this context, a whole literature related to these ostensiones reliquiarum as well as to the history of the city and of its churches emerged (so-called Heiltumsschriften), the most notorious example being Johannes Enen’s “Medulla Gestorum Trevirensium”, a vernacular treaty published in 1514, with a second edition in 1515. Two years later, in 1517, a Latin version of the above-mentioned text was released (“Epitome alias medulla Gestorum Trevirorum”). Its author was Johannes Scheckmann, a monk from the Benedictine abbey of St Maximin who had already published four other prints and is believed to be behind a series of hagiographic texts preserved in manuscript form only.
Traditionally, Heilthumsbücher can be defined as printed brochures containing textual and visual information necessary for pilgrims to follow the exhibition ceremony of relics in a particular church. Yet, Scheckmann’s publications intrigue by their prosaic developments that lay far beyond the literary limits of their counterparts.
Acting as a true hagiographer, the monk of Saint-Maximin shaped a new form of compendium by reemploying a classical hagiographical repertory, including one of the two only preserved medieval treaties about the cult of the saints and the worship of their relics: Thiofrid of Echternach’s Flores Epytaphii Sanctorum (ca. 1100).
My paper’s proposal aims to explore to which extend Scheckmann’s work takes place in the context of an increased competition between sanctuaries to attract pilgrims; it also analysis the intended message of his writings in consideration with the past literature about the local saints.
Bastien Dubuisson, « L’hagiographie latine dans le diocèse de Trèves à la veille de la Réforme. L’exemple de l’abbaye bénédictine de Saint-Maximin »
Optical Character Recognition software makes it possible to overcome this gap by translating printed or handwritten characters into encoded glyphs, but not at any cost. Creating a digital corpus requires a careful reflection, particularly when it comes to small scale projects. Moreover, Latin being a highly inflected language, further post-processing steps such as tokenization and lemmatization are necessary in order to finally be able to process a corpus of texts with lines of code. During the digital transformation, each step leads to a profound but necessary modification of the original text and the creation of new data.
The example of Scheckmann’s works illustrates what is lost when a text is turned into bits, as well as what can be discovered once the machine reads.
Conferences by Bastien Dubuisson
Das diesjährige Arbeitstreffen bietet jüngeren ForscherInnen und etablierten WissenschaftlerInnen eine Plattform zum Austausch und zur Diskussion ihrer wissenschaftlichen Vorhaben. Forschende und Interessierte an hagiographischen Fragen sind eingeladen, an der Tagung teilzunehmen.
Based on a detailed codicological study as well as an analysis of the texts contained in the legendarium section of the factice codex, this article questions the context of production and use of the book object. A key point is whether the legendarium was the product of a Dominican enterprise or not. The detailed study of the literary tradition of several of the texts also sheds light on the provenance of the collection.
As a book belonging to a young female community of the Order, the homiliarium-legendarium also raises questions about the history of the conventual library and of its concrete use by the nuns. Like other manuscripts, it could be linked to the prioress Yolanda of Vianden whose life story is not unlike that of the saints in the legendarium.
EN: In the 12th century, the monks of the Benedictine abbey of St Maximin near Trier compiled a catalogue of the books in their armarium. Several of the works that are referenced were joint to form a composite collection. Subsequently, elements were added, removed and relocated, resulting in two separate manuscripts, which are now kept in Ghent and Berlin. Based on a codicological study, these assembly operations are reconstructed with the help of a table of contents and the identification of abstracts of Rupert of Deutz’ De divinis officiis. This case study illustrates the practices of book preservation and usage, in particular regarding hagiographic readings.
Cependant, si les informations collectées, présentées sous la forme d’une interface graphique, permettent à tout utilisateur d’obtenir rapidement des renseignements sur un texte donné (identifié par un n° BHL) et les manuscrits qui le contiennent, les données brutes de la base n’avaient à ce jour jamais été exploitées de façon globale. C’est une analyse de ce genre que nous proposons ici, par le biais de méthodes quantitatives, et notamment d’outils d’apprentissage automatique (machine learning) .
Pour ce faire, nous embrassons deux approches, qui considèrent la base de données globales sous deux angles de vue différents. D’une part, nous enquêtons sur le degré de similarité entre les manuscrits sur la base de leur contenu, à l’aide de techniques de partitionnement (clustering). D’autre part, nous étudions les relations qu’entretiennent entre eux les saints par le truchement de méthodes de fouille de règles d’association (rule mining) et de théorie des graphes.
Si le but final de notre analyse est bel et bien d’appliquer ces méthodes à l’ensemble de la base, nous aborderons dans un premier temps un cas d’étude concret, celui des manuscrits hagiographiques et des saints de l’ancien diocèse de Trèves. Les résultats de l’analyse quantitative peuvent ainsi être confrontés aux conclusions qualitatives obtenues par l’historiographie.
During his second stay in the Mosellan city in 1512, emperor Maximilian of Habsburg ordered the clergy to excavate the tunica Christi, a relic that had remained buried under the main altar of the eastern choir of the cathedral since the end of the 12th century. This inventio was followed by a series of ostensiones to show the Holy Tunic to the mass of people gathered in front of the cathedral. Being located on the pilgrimage route to Aachen and Cologne, the churches of Trier took advantage of the influx of pilgrims to promote their own places of worship. A real “flood of relics” (“Heiltumsflut”) fell upon the city with all the drifts that went with it such as the digging of bones and a massive consumption of indulgence letters, a lucrative activity heavily criticized by Martin Luther a few years later.
In this context, a whole literature related to these ostensiones reliquiarum as well as to the history of the city and of its churches emerged (so-called Heiltumsschriften), the most notorious example being Johannes Enen’s “Medulla Gestorum Trevirensium”, a vernacular treaty published in 1514, with a second edition in 1515. Two years later, in 1517, a Latin version of the above-mentioned text was released (“Epitome alias medulla Gestorum Trevirorum”). Its author was Johannes Scheckmann, a monk from the Benedictine abbey of St Maximin who had already published four other prints and is believed to be behind a series of hagiographic texts preserved in manuscript form only.
Traditionally, Heilthumsbücher can be defined as printed brochures containing textual and visual information necessary for pilgrims to follow the exhibition ceremony of relics in a particular church. Yet, Scheckmann’s publications intrigue by their prosaic developments that lay far beyond the literary limits of their counterparts.
Acting as a true hagiographer, the monk of Saint-Maximin shaped a new form of compendium by reemploying a classical hagiographical repertory, including one of the two only preserved medieval treaties about the cult of the saints and the worship of their relics: Thiofrid of Echternach’s Flores Epytaphii Sanctorum (ca. 1100).
My paper’s proposal aims to explore to which extend Scheckmann’s work takes place in the context of an increased competition between sanctuaries to attract pilgrims; it also analysis the intended message of his writings in consideration with the past literature about the local saints.
Bastien Dubuisson, « L’hagiographie latine dans le diocèse de Trèves à la veille de la Réforme. L’exemple de l’abbaye bénédictine de Saint-Maximin »
Optical Character Recognition software makes it possible to overcome this gap by translating printed or handwritten characters into encoded glyphs, but not at any cost. Creating a digital corpus requires a careful reflection, particularly when it comes to small scale projects. Moreover, Latin being a highly inflected language, further post-processing steps such as tokenization and lemmatization are necessary in order to finally be able to process a corpus of texts with lines of code. During the digital transformation, each step leads to a profound but necessary modification of the original text and the creation of new data.
The example of Scheckmann’s works illustrates what is lost when a text is turned into bits, as well as what can be discovered once the machine reads.
Das diesjährige Arbeitstreffen bietet jüngeren ForscherInnen und etablierten WissenschaftlerInnen eine Plattform zum Austausch und zur Diskussion ihrer wissenschaftlichen Vorhaben. Forschende und Interessierte an hagiographischen Fragen sind eingeladen, an der Tagung teilzunehmen.