By the end of the ninth century CE, vernacular languages had definitively replaced Latin in everyday oral interactions throughout the Carolingian world. However, Latin remained by and large dominant in written culture. So far the assumption has been that its use guaranteed universal intelligibility across the Latin West. However, small scale case studies carried out on specific types of written evidence have revealed strong regional syntactic variation, suggesting that despite general intelligibility, regional Latin cultures were gradually drifting apart. The whole extent of this variation is not yet understood, and its potential for understanding the development of these cultures remains unexplored. Recent developments in computational linguistics and dialectometry hold the promise of mapping this regional variation and thereby substantially enriching historians’ and linguists’ understanding of written culture in the High Middle Ages. At the same time, the dialectometric toolkit still requires expansion in order to adequately deal with the mapping of syntactic variation attested in corpora, so methodologically as well, there is great potential for improving the state of the art.
Using an interdisciplinary approach, the current project aims to achieve just that: combine methodological innovation with new insights into linguistic variation and medieval written culture. As a test case, it will look at a substantial corpus of Latin hagiographies (texts on the life, achievements and cult of saints) and biographies from tenth-century Lotharingia, a contact zone between the Romance and Germanic linguistic areas with a particularly high and wellresearched production of such texts. The project is driven by the question of whether the cultural and social dynamics behind the production of this corpus can be linked to patterns in the linguistic variation in the texts, whether influenced by respective substrate languages or emerging (localized) communities of practice. In combining a linguistic and a contextualizing historical approach, the project will break new ground in understanding Latin culture and the circulation of knowledge and ideas in this transitional period of Western society and culture.