Agiografia, politica e società nella Bretagna medievale: edizione e confronto delle diverse vitae di san Macuto

The aim of the research project is to study the hagiographical dossier of Saint Machutus, born in Wales and then bishop of the Breton city of Alet. The biographical outline of this character fades into legend, but, according to the hagiographical narratives, he would have lived between sixth and seventh century. The BHL (Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina) lists six texts connected to this figure: five vitae, three of which are early medieval (one of these, BHL 5116, was written by a deacon of the same Alet and the other two, BHL 5117 and BHL 5118, are anonymous) and two late medieval (one written by Sigebert of Gembloux, BHL 5119, and the other, BHL 5120, by Jean de Châtillon, bishop of Alet from 1144 to 1163), and an anonymous tale of translatio reliquiarum (BHL 5124). The first main objective is to provide new critical editions for each component of the hagiographical dossier; it is a fundamental work because for two of them (BHL 5119 and BHL 5120) there have been no attempts to constitute a critical text, while, for the remaining hagiographies, the available editions consider only a minority of manuscripts known today (this is the case of BHL 5116 and BHL 5118) or present some problematic aspects that have to be reconsidered (BHL 5117 and BHL 5124). A new survey of manuscripts, that allows the identification of new witnesses, has therefore been carried out; all of them have been fully collated in order to reconstruct the critical text following the stemmatic-reconstructive (or neo-Lachmannian) method. Lastly, each part of the dossier has been provided with introductory prolegomena, complete critical positive apparatus, sources apparatus, commentary and translation. Furthermore, the second major aim of the project is to understand the motivations behind the creation of a such high number of texts in a fairly limited geographical and temporal space. The investigation of the reasons for writing and rewriting is an essential point of the work because, first of all, it allows to investigate the history, in some aspects still unknown, of medieval French Brittany, second, this analysis permits to highlight the interest of hagiographical narratives for historians not only from a religious and doctrinal point of view, but also for their insights on local politics. For both aims the comparison between different texts is indispensable and represents the most innovative part of the work: for the first time, the focus in not on a single hagiography but on the entire dossier of Saint Machutus. All the aspects that emerge from the comparison are contained in the Introduction which analyzes some historical aspects, the sources of the texts, the connections between them, the use of language and the reasons of writing. Finally, a digital part was integrated in the project in order to make the comparation easier and show to the reader the data underlying the final results, allowing at the same time to reuse them and expand the research to new possibilities. This section takes the form of a web app and provides digital editions of each text, based on the XML-TEI standard and displayed through the software EVT 2 (to which some code modifications has been applied to make it more fitting to my use case), as well as an advanced comparison tool, developed ex novo using the Angular 16 framework. These digital instruments make it possible to realize something that would not be feasible to achieve using paper, exploiting the modelling and the interactivity of digital media.