Corpus Of Letters Research Articles

Jerome's Corpus of Letters and Network Analysis

In recent decades, network analysis has gained significant popularity as a methodological approach among scholars. This paper focuses on the letter collection of Jerome of Stridon (ca. 347‑420 AD) and employs network theory and specialized software for network analysis. The objective is twofold: to uncover statistical insights and to provide interpretations of different facets, including the actors’ roles, the most influential figures within the network, and the patterns of letter usage. Additionally, the paper presents visual representations of the network.

Oggetti filologici immaginari: le lettere scritte dai soldati-contadini romeni transilvani durante la prima guerra mondiale

Within the framework of an ample project dedicated to the study of WW I memory literature in Romanian culture, the present study aims at reflecting upon particular philological objects, most of them – imaginary, while the few real ones take unexpected forms. Philologists have frequently remarked upon the lack of an extensive corpus of letters written by Transylvanian Romanian peasants (drafted into the army of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) and tend to put it down to the extremely precarious literacy standards of the category in question. Nevertheless, the “letter” as an instrument of correspondence between two worlds, an object both magical and redeeming, is a recurrent literary motif in the Transylvanian Romanian folklore inspired by the historical event in question. This topos is the object of our analysis. Between the modern written culture and the archaic oral one, imagining the letter in texts and folkloric artefacts belies the mentality conflicts triggered off by the war, as well as the means by which the rural (conservative) populace attempts to come to terms with the violence brought about by the new history ushered by the world conflict.

Concerning the Defamation and Execution of the “Radical” Ludwig Hätzer (1500–1529): An Attempt at Using Social Network Analysis on Small Samples

Abstract This paper uses the method of Social Network Analysis to generate new insights into the life and trial of the dissident theologian and translator Ludwig Hätzer. With the help of the programme visone, the corpus of letters in which Hätzer is mentioned during his lifetime is visualised and analysed, incorporating the different evaluations Hätzer receives in the correspondence. The network analysis reveals the important role the brothers Ambrosius and Thomas Blarer in Constance played in connecting different parts of the network. It also shows that communication between theologians and cities seems to have taken place conspicuously separately. The paper argues that letters by individuals like Wolfgang Capito and Martin Bucer might, in the end, have been more relevant in preparing the ground for Hätzer’s execution than polemical pamphlets. It also reveals that the turning point for Hätzer’s reputation must have been his acquaintance with Hans Denck.

The Corpus of Early English Correspondence Extension Sampler (ceeces)

Abstract This data paper describes the Corpus of Early English Correspondence Extension Sampler (ceeces), a linguistic corpus of personal letters covering the long eighteenth century. The letters have been sampled and transcribed from various printed editions and are now openly distributed through Zenodo. The ceeces contains 2,624 letters by 200 writers, some 1.14 million words. It comes in several versions – plain text, xml, standardised-spelling, and part-of-speech tagged – with ample metadata on the correspondents and the letters, enabling the sociolinguistic study of historical English using a range of social variables including gender, age, social rank, and geographical region.

Linguistic annotation of cuneiform texts using treebanks and deep learning

Abstract We describe an efficient pipeline for morpho-syntactically annotating an ancient language corpus which takes advantage of bootstrapping techniques. This pipeline is designed for ancient language scholars looking to jump-start their own treebank projects, which can in turn serve further pedagogical research projects in the target language. We situate our work in the field of similar ancient language treebank projects, arguing that our approach shows that individual humanities scholars can leverage current machine-learning tools to produce their own richly annotated corpora. We illustrate this pipeline by producing a new Akkadian-language treebank based on two volumes from the online editions of the State Archives of Assyria project hosted on Oracc, as well as a spaCy language model named AkkParser trained on that treebank. Both of these are made publicly available for annotating other Akkadian corpora. In addition, we discuss linguistic issues particular to the Neo-Assyrian letter corpus and data-encoding complications of cuneiform texts in Oracc. The strategies, language models, and processing scripts we developed to handle both linguistic and data-encoding issues in this project will be of special interest to scholars seeking to develop their own cuneiform treebanks.

New and Old Letter Types in the Corpus of Julian the Apostate ( 361–363 )

Abstract The emperor Julian’s career as a letter writer began long before his brief term as sole ruler of the united Roman empire from 361 to 363. In the surviving collection of 82 letters, only 73 were deemed authentic by their editor Emily Wilmer Cave Wright in the 1923 Loeb edition. The remaining nine she deemed apocryphal. This paper looks at two methodological issues associated with Julian’s letter collections. What grounds should the modern scholar use to discern authentic from forged letters; and were Julian’s letters of the same types as Christian letters of Late Antiquity or were they closer to Classical models? A third question arises from a survey of Julian’s epistolary addressees. These reveal a diverse network of people of various levels of status, including Basil, bishop of Caesarea, the Jews of Alexandria, and a priestess of Demeter and Cybele. How does this diversity compare with the correspondence of ( Christian ) emperors and bishops of the fourth century? I aim to answer these questions by considering those letter types in Julian’s letter corpus that were new in the fourth century, such as letters of recommendation for travellers and letters to religious groups, and others more familiar, that is, letters of friendship and letters of consolation. The overarching hypothesis is that Julian was inspired to write and have collected his public and personal letters in the same way as the Christian bishops whom he knew and with whom he corresponded, notably Bishop Basil of Caesarea.

Language maintenance and shift in a Swiss community on the Black Sea

Abstract This paper explores the dynamics of the linguistic situation in a Swiss colony of Shabo on the Black Sea, created in 1822. Its political belonging changed several times: from the Russian empire to the Kingdom of Romania and the USSR (today Ukraine). Metalinguistic discourse produced by various social actors in different sociopolitical settings is compared here to the use of Francoprovençal, French, and Russian as discovered in archival data. Accordingly, the study is based, on the one hand, on the narratives in manuscripts and publications (from the Archives of Odessa, Bern, and Romainmôtiers), and on the other hand, on a corpus of private letters (from family archives in Vaud), as well as early (socio)linguistic descriptions compared to linguistic data collected in Vaud. This case study aims to shed light on the complex relationship between the linguistic processes and language ideologies in changing socio-political spaces.

Beneath Thy Protection: Portrait of the Holy Virgin as a semantic operator

Starting from the third century, many songs, prayers, and icons testify to the way the Virgin Mary – Mother of God – has been attributed the role of protecting the community. Examples include the Akhathist hymn traditionally dated to the siege of Constantinople (626), the Polish anthem “Bogurodzica”, associated with the battle of Grunwald (1410), the icon of Częstochowa that protected Poland from the Swedish invasion (1655), and numerous others. The role of menace is embodied by different enemies: infidels, heretics, or atheists. The Virgin watches over the frontier between two cultural spaces: the inside and the outside of the semiosphere. A case study will provide insight into the function played by the Madonna at the border: the Madonna of the Rocciamelone, the highest sanctuary in Europe, founded by the crusader knight Rotharius (1358). A bronze statue of the Virgin was placed in the sanctuary in 1899. A small corpus of pastoral letters written by blessed Edoardo Rosaz, bishop of Susa (Piedmont), expresses the hope that the Virgin will protect Catholics from liberal heresy. Plastic oppositions such as top/bottom, resulting from the relationship between the Virgin and the landscape, are used to manifest abstract oppositions such as reason/passion, order/disorder, and Church/revolution. This homologation helps us understand how the Virgin, placed in upper space, embodies knowledge and cognition: she becomes a lookout, allowing a transfer of values from the semantic field of war to the religious one. The Virgin guards the border of the semiosphere, the border dividing the self from the other. Her function is the semiotization of incoming materials, transforming external non-communication into information and meaning. This article thus considers the Virgin as a semantic operator inverting the values of liberal discourse into information stored in Catholic cultural space. A mathematical model of the function played by the Virgin will be presented in the terms of quantum computing.

The media campaign against denunciations as a tool of nationalist mobilisation in Finland, 1899–1917

This article examines the role of the print media in a campaign against political denunciations in the Grand Duchy of Finland from 1899 to 1917. It explores how the public condemnation of denunciations and denouncers evolved into a means for Finnish nationalist activists to raise national awareness and mobilise citizens against the integration policies of the Russian government. The source material includes Finnish newspapers and magazines, analysed through qualitative and computational methods, and a corpus of letters between citizens and the Governor-General. The article shows that the increase in the media coverage of denunciations was linked to the imperial integration policies, and that newspapers across party lines framed the denunciations as a national threat. The anti-denunciation campaign culminated during the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, when the nationalist news media published extensive name lists of denouncers based on findings from the confiscated papers of the imperial authorities. Overall, the article suggests that the media campaign against denunciations effectively suppressed the practice of denunciation in Finland, even if it also fostered an atmosphere of ubiquitous surveillance and may have inspired some individuals to become denouncers.

Puzzles and Patronage in the Persian Cosmopolis: Moʿin al-Din Esfezāri’s Acrostic Letter to Mahmud Gāvān

Abstract This article studies a literary puzzle, a maktub-e movashshah or acrostic letter, that is among the Persian monshaʾāt (stylized literary letters) of the Herat-based historian and secretary Moʿin al-Din Mohammad Zamji Esfezāri (fl. 1468–94/873–99). Created in praise of the Bahmani vizier Mahmud Gāvān (d. 1481/886), Esfezāri’s composition fits within a corpus of letters that testifies to the existence of epistolary contacts between Gāvān and the élites of the court of Soltān-Hosayn Bāyqarā (r. 1469–1506/873–911). Esfezāri’s letter is especially valuable because it elucidates Timurid intellectuals’ interests in such relations in the second half of the fifteenth/ninth century. An analysis of its message shows that Timurid literati could pursue long-distance patronage in the Deccan, without necessarily migrating to the region. The letter’s acrostic form, moreover, is an interesting case of how authors of Persian texts could strike a balance between local expectations and transregional aspirations in the Persian cosmopolis.

Testing Frenchification: A Sociolinguistic Analysis of French Loan Morphology in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Dutch

There is a long history of social, cultural and political contact between the Dutch and French language areas, which has also resulted in language contact. In the Dutch language area, the cultural and linguistic contact situation has resulted in an anti-French discourse of alleged Frenchification from the sixteenth century onwards. The peak of influence from French is traditionally located in the eighteenth century. However, corpus-based research of the actual influence of French on Dutch in the Early and Late Modern periods is still scarce. We investigate the use of 31 French loan suffixes (e.g. the verbal suffix -eren, nominal suffixes such as -age and -teit, and adjectival suffixes such as -aal) in the Letters as Loot Corpus, which is a socially stratified corpus of private and business letters from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, written by men and women from various regions in the northern Low Countries. A regression analysis shows that the overall distribution of French loan suffixes is quite similar in the two periods, except for the capital Amsterdam, where there is a significant increase in the eighteenth century. Further significant effects are found for men and for the higher social ranks, and for business or mixed letters (as opposed to purely private letters). The results suggest that French-origin items entered the language of the northern Low Countries as relatively formal or conceptually written forms, mainly adopted by upper (middle) class men from the cosmopolitan city of Amsterdam.

Die Autobiographie Gustav Hänels in einer Handschrift der Leipziger Universitätsbibliothek – Edition und Kommentar

Summary The Autobiography of Gustav Hänel in a Manuscript from the Leipzig University Library – Edition and Commentary. Gustav Hänel (1792–1878) was a law professor in Leipzig, and is still famous for his numerous editions of early medieval Roman law texts. Besides a huge corpus of letters, there is also a handwritten autobiography kept in the Leipzig University Library (Cod. Haen. 58) as part of Hänel’s estate today. This autobiography not only contains personal information, but bears witness to 19th century Europe (and beyond). Since the document has hitherto scarcely been considered by research, an edition is provided here for the first time ever.

Multiple Interpretation and Fragmented Texts Within a Historical Corpus: The Case of Old East Slavic Vernacular Writing

Abstract The paper presents the issue of fragmented and/or ambiguously interpreted texts within the corpora of Old East Slavic vernacular writing. One of these corpora, the corpus of the Old East Slavic birchbark letters, is already available, the other, comprising the texts of Old East Slavic inscriptions, is under preparation. Due to the fragmentary state of many birchbark and epigraphy texts, their lemmatization and grammatical tagging may be uncertain and multiple interpretations may coexist. Some lemmas survive only in fragments which are nevertheless relevant for the study of lexicon. The grammatical status of many fragments may be firmly established despite lacking lexical information. However the relevant data on these fragments is not available in the word indices and corpora that take into consideration only best-preserved word forms. In the paper, the representation and annotation of such word forms within the Old East Slavic vernacular corpora is presented, and relative frequencies of such phenomena within the birchbark letter corpus are shown, with some case studies showing the relevance of the annotation of fragmented forms. The existing approaches, namely for the classical epigraphy within the EpiDoc standard and in the Hittite syntactic treebanks, are also briefly presented and compared to the solution found within the Old East Slavic vernacular corpora.

Epistles of Basil the Great in Georgian translations of XVIII-XIX centuries (Gaios the Rector and anonymous translator)

Basil the Great's epistles were translated into Georgian twice during the 18th-19th cc. In 1798-1799, an almost complete corpus of letters, 356 epistles (ep. 1-38, 42-359), was rendered by Gaios the Rector. Thereafter, in the first quarter of the 19th c., an anonymous translator rendered two epistles of the same author (ep. 1, 2.1-3). The rendition of Gaios the Rector is preserved in the manuscripts of Ioane Bagrationi’s collection N 274 (1798; part I) and N 95 (1799; part II, ep. 150.2-359), both being autographs. The manuscripts are maintained in Saint Petersburg’s National Library of Russia. A copy of the second part of the epistle collection is preserved in the National Centre of Manuscripts of Georgia N S 381 (1846, ep. 151-359). The translation of Gaios the Rector represents word-by-word rendition of the Russian edition (Василий Великий, 1787), though the Russian source is estimated as being “obscure and not always correct” (Попов, 1902, 197). The obscurity, to some extent, is found also in the Georgian translation. The rendition of the anonymous translator, ep. 1, 2.1-3, is preserved in the autograph manuscript N A 820 (first quarter of the 19th c.) of the National Centre of Manuscripts of Georgia. The anonymous translator used the same Russian edition and the Greek source of the latter (Sancti Patris Nostri Basilii, 1730). Comparing the rendition to the deed of Gaios the Rector, it is evident that the translation is also literal, however, more elaborated on account of the nature of the Georgian language, while in Gaios’ rendition even the word order of the source is mostly maintained. Both translations follow the literary style of Anton I, Catholicos of Georgia. Both of them, especially the corpus of epistles fully rendered by Gaios the Rector, had a great importance for the intellectual society of his time.

From I am, with sincere regard, your most obedient servant to Yours sincerely: The simplification of leavetaking formulae in 18th-century Scottish and Irish English letters

Abstract The study in hand investigates the impact of social status on the use and change of pragmatic formulae in historical varieties of English. The study asks which leavetaking formulae are used between writers of equal social status in varieties of English in the later 18th century. Working on a corpus of letters compiled from two subsets of letters each from 18th-century Scottish and Irish English, the study illustrates pragmatic change on the basis of the investigation of leavetakings involving the servant formula. By doing so, the study also helps to widen the hitherto predominating narrow focus on mainly English English. The study shows that the use of formulae is situationally dependant. It suggests that pragmatic change takes place amongst writers of equal social status in the private domain, which then leads to the use of such formulae in the public domain and to the use between writers of different status groups.

Female Genius: Eliza Harriot and George Washington at the Dawn of the Constitution

Female Genius: Eliza Harriot and George Washington at the Dawn of the Constitution

What did Constantine learn in 325? Constantine’s theological declarations before, at and after Nicaea

The analysis of the corpus of letters of the emperor Constantine, in particular, the one he addressed to the synod of Arles in 314, the one he addressed to the Church of Nicomedia in 325 and the one he addressed to Arius in 333, and of Eusebius of Caesarea’s account of the Synod of Nicaea in 325, allows to evaluate the evolution of the theological representations of the first Christian emperor. Constantine’s interest was not only political, but he also was able to listen to and understand the theological milestones of the controversy.

Darian R. Lockett. Letters for the Church: Reading James, 1–2 Peter, 1–3 John, and Jude as Canon

Darian R. Lockett. <i>Letters for the Church: Reading James, 1–2 Peter, 1–3 John, and Jude as Canon</i>

Deciphering Mary Stuart’s lost letters from 1578-1584

Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots (1542–1587), has left an extensive corpus of letters held in various archive collections. There is evidence, however that other letters from Mary Stuart are missing from those collections, such as letters referenced in other sources but not found elsewhere. In Under the Molehill – an Elizabethan Spy Story, John Bossy writes that a secret correspondence with her associates and allies, prior to its compromise in mid-1583, was “kept so secure that none of it has survived, and we don’t know what was in it.” We have found over 55 letters fully in cipher in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, which, after we broke the code and deciphered the letters, unexpectedly turned out to be letters from Mary Stuart, addressed mostly to Michel de Castelnau Mauvissière, the French ambassador to England. Written between 1578 and 1584, those newly deciphered letters are most likely part of the aforementioned secret correspondence considered to have been lost, and they constitute a voluminous body of new primary material on Mary Stuart – about 50,000 words in total, shedding new light on some of her years of captivity in England.

Life and Other Fictions

Abstract This essay makes a case for recognizing Andrzej Bobkowski, the author of masterful World War II diaries, a large corpus of fascinating letters, and Conradian short stories, as one of the twentieth century's major writers.