• Funding : Artois
  • Start year :
  • 2026

In the Christian society of the medieval West (5th-15th centuries), the Bible constituted both a cultural and religious foundation, the book par excellence, and a matrix for understanding the world. Early thirteenth-century theologians referred to the “book-world” to describe the close relationship between the sacred history set forth in the biblical text and human actions. The major intellectual task imposed on medieval scholars was to understand and explain the Bible, and to analyze its historical, literary, and symbolic dimensions. This exegetical work was as much a religious quest as it was a historical, sociological, or political inquiry.

Medieval exegetical thought was cumulative in nature, and exegetical texts were the result of a genuine stratigraphy of authors, commentaries, and glosses. With the exception of a few Church Fathers, such as Saint Augustine or Isidore of Seville, exegetes did not mention the authors whose ideas they reused and incorporated into their own thought.

The aim of the PhD project is to develop Artificial Intelligence methods centered on knowledge extraction tailored to Latin biblical texts, in order to identify references to authors, commentaries, and glosses from earlier texts. The resulting entity-linking coreference model will make it possible to study the evolution of medieval thought from the 5th to the 15th century.