Guides to the Holy Land: Geographical and Textual Scales

Abstract

The article explores some of the problems raised by the study of Medieval guides to the Holy Land, by taking into consideration a group of small Latin texts and their French and Italian adaptations. It focuses on how to create a corpus of related texts, on understanding the development of the tradition and on the relationships between the texts of the corpus. It then studies the manuscript corpus of the guides and how they have been compiled and repurposed as part of a larger text in the Rothelin Continuation of William of Tyre.

The topics chosen are useful to test some of the scale-related concepts used in philology, especially those focusing on the organizational complexity of texts in order to understand the gradient from scribal variation to editorial intervention, compilation and authorial creation.