Travelling Annotations: Network Analysis as a Tool to Study Glossing Networks in Carolingian Europe

While traditionally, the transmission of medieval texts is studied by means of stemmatics, certian types of textuality are well-known as being particularly resistent to traditional methods. This is also the case with annotations. While annotations can behave text-like, it is more often the case that each individual gloss must be treated as an autonomous entity. In different manuscripts different combinations of glosses are combined so that two manuscripts may contain a very different assembly of glosses and look dissimilar, while being closely related. In such cases, network analysis proves handy as a mean to reveal connection between manuscripts and trace the patterns of transmission of particular annotations, while opening new ways of using this transmission as a proxy for studying the intellectual networks that participated in such an exchange. In this presentation, I will exemplify this approach on the corpus of early medieval annotations to the Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville, the most important medieval Latin encyclopaedia. More specifically, it can be presupposed that most of the glosses to this text came into being in the context of its use for teaching in Carolingian period (c. 750 – 900). Their transfer, thus, may be related to the circulation of schoolmasters, students, and books through the networks of Carolingian schools.