At the beginning of 2012, the employee department at the Munich commission for the publication of a Mediaeval Latin Dictionary (Mittellateinischen Wörterbuches – MLW) at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences with the Commission for Ancient Literature and Latin Traditions, was transferred to the former Institute for the Cultural History of Antiquity, todays Department for Classics at the OeAI.

The »Mediaeval Latin Dictionary up until the late 13th century« belongs to a pan-European joint project with the goal of making comprehensively accessible the Latin language of the Middle Ages from a lexicographical perspective. These dictionary projects, under the auspices of the Union Académique Internationale, independently of one another carry out fundamental research of the highest quality for the international scientific community of experts. The Mediaeval dictionary, belonging to the largest of these projects, represents the German-speaking areas (Germany, Switzerland, Austria).

The object of the project is the Latin literature that arose within the timeframe from the 6th century up until 1280 in German-speaking regions; in addition, it deals with important texts of this epoch which are concerned with German history in a broader sense. Beyond the actual geographic borders of the dictionary, specialised literary texts from other regions have also been recorded.

The focal point of the Mediaeval Latin dictionary lies in the area of semantics. In order to compile the item, the material concerning the individual lemmata are reviewed and organised according to their meanings. The results of this examination of the words are represented in a dictionary article in a concise and lucid manner, and provided with textual quotations. The material basis is a selected corpus of ca. 4,000 texts that are representative for the different centuries and types of texts and are particularly linguistically rich.

Publication

Conference, “Technical Language(s) in the Middle Ages” (2012)
Proceedings of the fifth international Mediaeval Latin lexicographic conference, Munich, 12–15 September 2012, »Fachsprache(n) im mittelalterlichen Latein / Technical Language(s) in the Middle Ages / Langage(s) technique(s) au moyen âge latin«, in: ALMA (Archivum Latinitatis Medii Aevi) 71 (2013).

Principal Investigator