Was It Augustine After All? Patristic Sources of Medieval Anti-heretical Polemics from the Perspective of Text Reuse Analysis

Abstract

The article explores the extent to which medieval polemical authors resorted to patristic originals and how much they adopted patristic argumentation. The authors used computational text reuse analysis using BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) to compare 189 classical and medieval texts, mainly from open repositories of digitized texts, to find similarities. The corpus includes classical works, particularly Augustine’s anti-heretical treatises, canon law, inquisition manuals, exempla collections and florilegia, sermons, and theological commentaries. The lack of medieval texts after ca. 1200 in machine-readable format is the greatest hindrance to building a representative medieval corpus. The authors propose that although medieval polemicists saw Augustine and other Church fathers as models of Christian champions fighting heresy, intensive engagement with patristic theology took place in medieval works with limited circulation and influence. (Abstract created with the help of Perplexity.ai.)

Keywords

• anti-heretical polemics
• ancient heresy
• medieval heresy
• augustine
• text reuse
• blast