Subproject B01

Jesus and Mary as Divine Healers in Service for the Salvation of the Faithful: A Mixed-Method Analysis of Medical Metaphorizations in Medieval German Texts

Subproject B01 investigates medical metaphors in Christian texts from the Middle Ages. The concept of ‘salvation’, ‘Seelenheil’ in German, is one of the fundamental elements of the Christian faith. The notion of a soul that requires healing implies that it has been sick or wounded; therefore, medical vocabulary is used to depict the spiritual dimension of this. Combining hermeneutic and computational methods, we will, first, manually annotate, analyze and interpret medical metaphors and, second, apply quantitative methods to identify metaphorically used words, infer their meaning(s), and support hermeneutic interpretation.