The Lost Manuscripts of Medieval Europe
Lecture by Jean-Baptiste Camps, scientific director of the ERC LostMa project at the École nationale des chartes - PSL.
Even those unfamiliar with medieval epics have likely heard the tale of Charlemagne's nephew, Roland, and his heroic death in the Pyrenees Mountains. It may even have been sung to the soldiers of William the Conqueror on the eve of the Battle of Hastings.
Nearly 1,000 years later, it is still used in university courses and reimagined in popular fantasy novels. When we think of the Song of Roland, we first think of its short, archaic version. Yet, this version has been almost entirely lost and survives in only one manuscript, cheap and seemingly amateurish, copied somewhere near Oxford in the first half of the 12th century. Why do we only have one manuscript of this illustrious version, while we possess ten manuscripts of later rhymed versions, some of which were copied in Italy nearly 200 years later?
This is not an isolated case of a lost, or nearly lost, text, ranging from the lost biblical books to the majority of Livy's History of Rome, including the epic poem Beowulf and Chrétien de Troyes's romance Isolde.
This raises an important question about the transmission of culture and texts: what role do chance and social, cultural, textual, or material factors play in the transmission of culture and in the survival, evolution, or extinction of literary works?
Philologists, like biologists and linguists, have adopted the family tree as a metaphor since the 19th century to represent the relationships between the various documents containing a given work, as deduced from the innovations (errors, mutations) they exhibit. Since at least Joseph Bédier in 1928, it has been observed that these trees present very particular and unbalanced forms, difficult to explain intuitively.
This problem of "unbalanced trees" is also present in biology, where it has been the subject of much attention and research.
To address this long-standing question, a new research project, called LostMa, is starting at the École des Chartes and will be presented during this talk. It adopts a completely revised methodology, combining philological expertise with mathematical modeling and computer simulations, the analysis of philological data, and artificial intelligence for manuscript analysis.
This project aims to assess the role of social and cultural factors, such as changes in book production, authority, and the different contexts of island and mainland cultures. Ultimately, it hopes to gain a better understanding of the "life and death" of cultural artifacts and the missing pieces of the puzzle that underlie most of our knowledge about past cultures.