Hermeneutic Exempla:
Retracing Medieval Exegetic Strategies in the Gesta Romanorum (HERMES)
Funding organization: Austrian Science Fund (FWF)
Stand-Alone project: 10.55776/PAT1459224
Project duration: 2026-2030
Budget: EUR 656,226.00
Principal investigator: Univ.-Prof. Dr. Mario Klarer
Project description
“And the moral of the story is ….” This phrase has been applied to numerous texts throughout literary history – but rarely has the moral itself been made the main feature of an entire microcosm of stories. The Gesta Romanorum, however, does just that. In this extremely popular medieval compilation of stories, whose oldest versions date back to 1342, the approximately 240 episodes are coupled with a moral, i.e., an interpretation, sometimes longer than the narrative itself. The Gesta Romanorum spans a variety of topics, textual genres, and characters, including ancient mythological figures, historical personages, paraphrases of biblical stories, fables, and farces. The Gesta Romanorum inspired world literature by Chaucer, Boccaccio, Shakespeare, or Thomas Mann, to name only some of the most important authors. Surviving in hundreds of manuscripts and numerous early imprints, the Gesta Romanorum has been an omnipresent inspiration for both authors and readers for centuries.
As almost all of the Gesta Romanorum stories contain an added interpretation, they are a one-of-a-kind collection of medieval interpretive practices, which the HERMES project will open up to lay-readers and scholars alike by producing a digitally tagged and publicly available data set of a selection of manuscripts. This data set will provide the foundation for the scholarly exploration of medieval meaning-making strategies and interpretive practices, conducted via manual as well as machine-based, statistical analyses. At the same time, it will serve the creation of two editions – the Continental Latin and the German version – which will be published in conjunction with the project, enabling a broad reception of this significant part of literary history.