From Beneventan Script to Digital Interface: Modeling the Transition from Medieval Manuscript to Early Modern Print in the Legenda Sancti Guilielmi

This thesis examines the application of digital tools to the study and representation of a medieval hagiographical text in Beneventan script, using the Vita et obitu sancti Guilielmi as a case study. Rather than producing a traditional critical or fully synoptic edition, the research focuses on the digital workflow that transforms both manuscript and printed images into structured, interoperable, and navigable textual data. The manuscript is transcribed diplomatically using eScriptorium’s handwritten text recognition tools, through a model I trained specifically for Beneventan script. The 1581 printed edition is acquired through a separate OCR/HTR workflow. Both texts are encoded in TEI-XML and processed through XSLT transformations to generate an HTML-based research environment. This interface enables multiple modes of scholarly exploration, including synoptic visualizations of selected sections, structured indices, and a geolocated map linking narrative space to historical geography. The sixteenth-century printed edition edited by Felice Renda is approached not as an ecdotic witness, but as a moment of reception and refunctionalization of the medieval text. Digitally aligned passages make visible processes of normalization, institutional rewriting, and devotional restructuring accompanying the transition from manuscript to print. The thesis thus offers both a methodological contribution, by testing digital tools on a non-standard medieval script, and a philological contribution, by demonstrating how digital representation can render visible the material and historical stratification of a hagiographical text. The resulting digital output is conceived as an open and reusable research environment, rather than a definitive textual endpoint.