The Anselm Corpus

"Interrogatio Sancti Anselmi de Passione Domini" ('Questions by Saint Anselm about the Lord's Passion') is a medieval religious treatise which is documented in an exceptionally broad number of written records. In total, there are around 70 German manuscripts and prints written up between the 14th and 16th centuries. In the texts, Anselm of Canterbury asks the Virgin Mary questions about the Passion of Jesus Christ, and she answers him in the form of long monologues. While the texts have comparable content, logical structure, and even (semi-)parallelity in sentence structure and wording, they do not follow fixed spelling conventions and show dialectal variations in graphematics, phonology, morphology, and syntax. This makes the corpus a highly interesting resource for comparative investigations in different areas such as linguistics, history or theology. The corpus is annotated on various layers, including normalization, morphology, part of speech, and lemma annotation.