Mind Your Words! The Role of Medieval Translations in the History of Concepts

The proposed project aims to use language studies to better understand medieval translations of philosophical treatises. It therefore wants to investigate whether the combination of a philological study (‘close reading’) and computational data (‘distant reading’) can succeed in objectively ascribing certain currently anonymous translations to known medieval translators, or at least in grouping them as the works of one unnamed scholar. If this methodology results in the identification of translators or the grouping of translations, it helps to understand the intellectual environment in which the translations originated, to describe stability and change in the technical vocabulary of science and philosophy as an essential part of the European conceptual history, and to study the geographical and chronological transfer of these texts and concepts.