Houghton MS Lat 5: The Transcription Challenge!

Houghton MS Lat 5 f. 1r (detail)

ABOUT

From Wednesday 23 March to Sunday 27 March 2022, the students in Harvard's Latin Palaeography and Manuscript Culture course (Medieval Studies 202) will work online with a team of volunteers to create a complete transcription of Houghton Library, MS Lat 5. The sixteen folios of MS Lat 5, containing a number of the Sermones de sanctis by the Franciscan theologian Konrad Holtnicker (Conrad of Saxony, †1279), were part of a larger manuscript that may have included other works by Konrad and that appears to have been written in the later thirteenth century. Anyone interested in joining the challenge should sign up here by Monday, 21 March. We will host an orientation session on Wednesday 3/23 from 1:30 to 2:45 pm EST, led by Dr. Laura Morreale. Participants are asked to join us in person in room 317 of Harvard's 1 Bow Street Building or online on Zoom (registration link here) for an introduction to the manuscript, the digital tools we will be using for collaborative transcription, and the process and deadlines we'll be following.

TRANSCRIPTION PORTAL

Our transcription work will make use of FromThePage, a software platform specially designed for the transcription and collation of documents. FromThePage allows documents to be uploaded and worked upon in a variety of formats, including the IIIF version of Houghton's manuscript that is the focus of our efforts. All members of the transcription team will need to create a (free) user account on Fromthe Page, after which they will be able to contribute on the project's transcription portal here.

PROJECT LOG

Each team member will be responsible for translating one or two folios of MS Lat 5, and for reviewing the work of another team member. These assigments can be found on the project log here. Once you have completed your transcription, or completed your review of your colleagues' work, enter the date and time in the relevant column of the project log. You also are encouraged to use the log's "Questions and Commentary" section to indicate any concerns, queries, or suggestions that you might have for a given folio.

TIMELINE

Team members can begin any time after the orientation session on Wednesday, 23 March. Interim deadlines are as follows:

Friday, 25 March (11:59 pm EDT): All transcriptions completed and ready for review;

Saturday, 26 March (11:59 pm EDT): All reviews of transcriptions completed and signed off;

Sunday, 27 March (11:59 pm EDT): Any corrections made, and final transcription completed.

Any questions or concerns can be directed to Sean either via email or on the event Slack channel.

RESOURCES FOR TRANSCRIPTION AND FURTHER RESEARCH

Zoom office hours with Sean Gilsdorf and/or Laura Morreale: Friday 25 March, 1:30-3:00 pm EDT. Zoom link here.

Capelli Online (from the University of Zürich's Ad Fontes project)

Dr. Olaf Pluta's Abbreviationes Online (Harvard Key login required)

Conrad of Saxony, Speculum Beatae Virginis (Florence, 1904), iv-xiv (on Conrad's life and writings)

Samuele Girotto, Corrado di Sassonia, Predicatore e Mariologo del sec. XIII (Florence, 1952)

David d’Avray, The Preaching of the Friars: Sermons Diffused from Paris before 1300 (Oxford, 1985)

Maria Sherwood-Smith, Studies in the Reception of the Historia Scholastica of Peter Comestor (Oxford, 2000), 35-55.

On the printing history of Conrad's sermons, and their erroneous attribution to Bonaventure in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, see the introduction to Doctoris seraphici S. Bonaventurae Opera omnia, vol. 9 (Florence, 1901) xi-xiv. The edition of 1521 (Paris, Badius Ascensius; reprinted in Brixen in 1596 by Polyceto Tulino) contains Conrad’s sermons de tempore, de sanctis, and de communi sanctorum (albeit under Bonaventure’s name) (see p. xiii-xiv).

EVENT SLACK CHANNEL