A sermon by any other name? The pseudo-Augustinian S. App. 121 and its medieval textual network

The Latin sermons preached by the Fathers of the Early Church – Augustine, Gregory, Leo – and their contemporaries had a dynamic and complex medieval afterlife. Throughout the Middle Ages, they circulated in manuscript form, usually as part of collections of patristic preaching. Both the collections and the sermons themselves were heavily manipulated as part of their medieval reception. Additionally, they circulated alongside (and became intertwined with) an enormous corpus of pseudo-epigraphic sermons that were attributed to one of the authoritative Fathers but of which the origin, whether Late-Antique or Medieval, is uncertain.
The ERC-funded PASSIM project (2019-2023) aims at charting and analysing the complex interrelations between the manuscripts transmitting patristic sermon collections, and between the texts they contain, through the development of a database and web application. In due course, these digital tools will grant access to the corpus’ complex research tradition, manuscript transmission and textual relations. In doing so, the PASSIM project strives to open up new research avenues for the study of the reception of Latin patristic sermons in medieval manuscripts. In addition to traditional list views, we aim to include in the PASSIM web application various types of network visualisations, presenting at a glance the manuscript transmission of a sermon, the building blocks of a collection, the spread of author attributions, the popularity of a sermon over time etc.
In this paper, we want to focus on network visualisations of textual overlap between sermons. Specifically, we will explore the challenges inherent in creating a serviceable network of a sermon’s textual relations that is not dependent upon a full textual analysis of the relevant texts. We want to point the user in the right direction without saying the final word on the subject. As a testcase, we will use the pseudo-Augustinian sermon S. App. 121, an anonymous text derived from various models, which also served as a model for later sermons. Moving from the conceptual to the concrete, our paper will explore the possibilities and challenges of visualisations for networks of texts, contributing as such to the accessibility of the complex corpus of patristic preaching and to the development of the PASSIM database.