Descrizione

For much of the Middle Ages, medical authorities agreed on a basic model of the human mind, assuming that the outer senses transmit impressions to three or four cells in the human brain that are responsible for imagination, rational thought, and memory. Scholars in the history of medicine have researched medieval brain anatomical notions quite well. However, scholarship to date has mostly failed to acknowledge that the workings of the human mind, as envisioned by medieval scholars and scientists, were not just pertinent to medicine, but also to other disciplines such as epistemology in philosophy, soul studies in theology, and the role of imagination and memory in literature. Despite the central status of these fields in their respective disciplines, we still lack a comprehensive, systematic examination of the huge role medieval brain anatomy played in major areas of medieval learning outside medicine proper.

The MENS project’s South and North Tyrolean team members aim to close this gap in scholarship by pursuing two interrelated goals:

1. A comprehensive, cross-disciplinary sample corpus of medieval brain anatomical discourses will incorporate a large body of hitherto neglected medieval medical, philosophical, and theological manuscripts, as well as other, nonmedical literary texts and text types. On the basis of this corpus, team members will produce interpretive publications on interdisciplinary brain anatomical discourses in core disciplines of medieval learning. Certain chapters of the history of medieval science and learning will have to undergo considerable revision based on the new sources that the MENS project will unearth.
2. The two project teams will also explore IT and machine learning possibilities with regard to automated transcriptions of medieval manuscript scans coupled with neural and ontology-based keyword spotting in order to screen large amounts of manuscript image data for specific content. In addition to facilitating specific brain anatomical searches in the MENS project, the machine learning or computational developments should also provide general tools for large-scale screening of any medieval or modern manuscript scans. Thus, the IT technology generated by the MENS project should serve as a structural model for an unlimited number of research projects in all possible fields of manuscript content inquiry.

The compilation of a content-oriented corpus of manuscripts on medieval brain anatomical thinking is intricately intertwined with the creation of optimized IT tools for big data searches in untranscribed manuscript scans. These combined efforts will break new ground in core areas of medieval studies as well as impact manuscript research technologies for documents from all historical periods and in all fields of academic inquiry.

Partner

Lead Partner Università di Innsbruck, Istituto di Studi americani, Partner Libera Università di Bolzano, Facoltà di Scienze informatiche