From 2 to 4 October 2024, TOME’s second team school was held in the picturesque town of Dobrichovice in Panska zahrada venue. Participants from all TOME’s research groups gathered to collaborate, exchange knowledge, and build stronger connections. The event featured a series of interactive workshops, group discussions, and team-building activities. This engaging and productive gathering highlighted the importance of teamwork and shared learning in achieving TOME’s objectives.
TOME’s 2nd team school was attended by: Alessandro Nannini, Alexander Huber (online), Jan Tvrz, Jana Ředinová, Jana Švadlenková, Jindra Kubíčková, Jo Hedesan, Lenka Řezníková, Lucie Storchová, Marcela Slavíková, Martin Žemla, Márton Szentpéteri, Ondřej Kříž, Petr Pavlas, Vojtěch Kaše, Vladimír Urbánek (guest).
Here you can find summaries of the talks presented over the three days of the School.
DAY 1 – Intellectual-historical Group
- Petr Pavlas – Evolution of Metaphors as a History of Cultural Ideas. The Case of the Circle/Sphere Metaphor before 1630
Petr presented a theoretical framework for researching the evolution of metaphors, and then provided an overview of the cognitively relevant uses of metaphors of circle, cycle and sphere from antiquity to 1630, the year of publication of Alsted’s Encyclopaedia septem tomis distincta.
- Lucie Storchová – Metaphors of the human heart and their epistemological shifts after 1600: A case study in Protestant discourses of power
Lucie presented the metaphor of heart and their role in political and social discourse of the 16th and 17th centuries. A key question behind this sort of sociopolitical metaphorics was: how do the members of the social body cooperate to save the body’s life and health? In general, bodily concepts are very polysemous, and the reason of this can naturally consist in a high measure of their “embodiment”. In particular, the concept of heart is absolutely crucial as the bodily organ of heart influences the whole of man and life. That is why it was said that the heart is a seat of “principia communia”, of “lex scriptum” (St Paul), of the spirits, and also of the Holy Spirit.
The metaphor had a disciplinary function too: attacking secular power means attacking heart. Basically, the heart metaphor usually entails a hierarchy. An interesting development of the heart metaphor into some political implication-complexes can be found in one anatomical poem from Nicolaus Selnecker’s Libellus de partibus corporis humani (Wittenberg 1554), and in Michael Maier’s Civitas corporis humani (1621): the heart is the king and the Sun, other important organs are magnates/magistrates/burghers, lower organs are populus/subditi.
Within the German Protestant discourse, there seems to occur a turn from the Melanchthonian providentialism toward Paracelsian-spiritualist mysticism after 1610. Political metaphors of the heart cease, and on the other hand, the astronomical metaphor of the heart (=the Sun) becomes very prominent as a tool of persuasion in favour of heliocentrism.
- Lenka Řezníková – Metaphors of Harmony in Comenius and in Early Modern Science
„Mersenne accomplished the harmonization of mechanics through the mechanization of music.“ (Peter Dear)
Lenka pointed out a tension between the specifically musical term and the early modern mathematical-mechanical notion of harmony. In Comenius as well as in many other of his colleagues and contemporaries, harmony is always a “holistic” notion: it expresses a bond or congruence of parts in a (mechanical) whole. The aesthetic sentiment of beauty as a positive emotion does not seem to be decisive here: rather, harmony is a highest order of any ordo. In Comenius, particularly, harmony oscillates between two fundamental domains: on the one hand, it is used in a context of mechanical metaphors related to knowledge and education (e.g. Typographeum vivum), and on the other hand, it is used as a metaphor for encyclopaedia. Sometimes both uses merge: “The encyclopedias I have seen so far – even the most organised ones – have seemed to me more like a chain skilfully made of many links than a machine assembled from flexible wheels and moving by itself.”
- Marcela Slavíková – Metaphors of Music in Comenius and in Early Modern Science
Marcela showed her research into musical metaphors and presented the results of her search into and analysis of the Comenius Opera Omnia database, the NOSCEMUS database, and also the Packard Humanities Institute’s database. She presented many rhetorical and literary uses of musical metaphors and argued for a claim that musical metaphors were not easily qualifiable as metaphors of knowledge in the sources in question. This is equally valid for Comenius’s use of the metaphors taken from music. Bazuine des genaden jaar (1632) and Letzte Posaun über Deutschland, for example, use the metaphor of trombone in a very straightforward reference to the biblical sources.
- Alessandro Nannini – Georgics of the Soul: Agriculture as Cultivation of the Self
in the Early Modern Age
Alessandro introduced the history of the metaphor of “georgics of the soul”. A groundwork of the metaphor of the georgics of the mind was laid in antiquity by Cicero, Seneca and Augustine. Alessandro reminded us, for example, the historical role and the interesting ambiguity of the traditional Augustinian expression “colere”, meaning both “worship” (the religious sense) and “cultivate” (the agricultural sense). In early modernity Francis Bacon considered the georgics of the mind as ethics. Arnold Wesenfeld and Samuel von Pufendorf therefore received this metaphor from a rich previous tradition – while the former conceived the georgics of the soul to be an individual therapy of passions, Pufendorf, say, collectivized “cultura” and broadened its meaning to the social level. Baumgarten, then, in a sense made from this collectivization an objectivization: aesthetics is an “incultus ager”; objective georgics of the disciplines (“sciences”) is a requisite for the subjective georgics of the soul. (PP: This is a bit similar to Jan Patočka’s view of the European history from antiquity up to modernity as the history of care for the soul, now in decline.)
- Márton Szentpéteri – King Solomon in Transylvania: Miklós Bethlen and his Castle
Márton first presented an opposition against the opinion which conceives metaphors as a linguistic phenomenon only. Not only CMT entails metaphor being a cognitive phenomenon, but also, for example, architectural theorist John B. Onians convincingly argues that metaphors can be spatial too. Consequently, it is possible to speak about metaphoricity in case of architectural artifacts when an architectural object refers to or even represent something different but in some way similar. For instance, Salomon’s temple seems to represent ordered knowledge and comprehensibility of the world throughout the Western intellectual history; Comenius’s Labyrinth or Kafka’s Castle, on the other hand, represent incomprehensibility and vanity.
In his case study, Márton showed principles, according to which Miklós Bethlen (1642-1716), Hungarian nobleman and disciple of the first Hungarian encyclopaedist János Apáczai Csere, designed his Transylvanian castle in 1667-1683. This country house shows a fundamental influence of his teacher, Nicolaus Goldmann (1611-1665), and his theory of universal architecture in the footsteps of the Jesuit Juan Bautista Villapando’s (1552-1608) reconstruction of the Temple of Solomon. Therefore, we can consider young Bethlen’s self-fashioning as referring to the young, moral, politically wise Old-Testament figure of young King Solomon. In contrast, late Bethlen’s written autobiography shows a very different metaphorization: all architecture is “vanitas vanitatum”, as the old Solomon, the alleged author of Ecclesiastes (Kohelet), has expressively portrayed.
- Martin Žemla – See, Hear, Taste. Sensory Metaphors in 16th and 17th Century
Paracelsianism
Martin presented an impressive historical overview of metaphors of taste (in comparison to other sensory metaphors) in the European philosophical, theological and mystical traditions (mainly Neoplatonism, Platonism, Kabbalah, Christian mysticism). The core of his investigation is 16th and 17th century Paracelsianism. Like Marcela in the case of musical metaphorics, he put forward the problem whether the metaphors of taste can be regarded as sensu stricto metaphors of knowledge. While the metaphors of seeing, looking, watching are (traditionally) exemplary metaphors of knowledge, the issue of taste is much more difficult given the nature of taste providing the receiving subject with qualitative data beyond the true-false dichotomy.
II. DAY 2 – Computational-historical Group
- Vojtěch Kaše – Computing Noscemus: a practical workshop in Python (1) & (2)
In first part of his workshop, Vojtěch introduced the participants into the TOME project coding environment, which now relies on the cloud computing services offered by CCS-Lab. He guided the participants through scripts used for generation, analysis, and visualization of static word embeddings trained on the Noscemus corpus. In the afternoon session, Vojtěch moved to the project’s current engagement with contextual latin embeddings based on Latin BERT and their potential to be used for metaphor detection.
- Jana Švadlenková – Cognitive & computational approaches to metaphors: an overview
Jana gave a very compelling overview of the history and systematics of CMT – cognitive/conceptual metaphor theory. She showed some examples of practical applications (mapping one conceptual domain to another one), and also posed some theoretical issues which CMT has to deal with (the concurrent theory of metaphorical blending and blended mental spaces). One of the messages of Jana’s talk was a claim that metaphors are challenging for machines as well as for humans. The following discussion implied a need of benchmarking necessary to validate the performance of the future AI-powered metaphor detector for early modern texts.
- Jan Tvrz – Contextual word embeddings and metaphor detection
Jan explained how the contextual word embeddings work, how they are gained from the data, and how they relate to the challenge of metaphor detection. Contextual word embeddings are a type of word representations created on the basis of the contextual meaning of the words. In contrast to Word2Vec etc. (static embeddings), dynamic word embeddings capture the context in which the individual instance of the word (token) appear as well as the contextual meaning of the singular word-token (roughly in the sense of the late Wittengenstein’s language theory). Obviously, for metaphor detection a combination of both approaches is necessary. Jan showed how metaphor detector works in the case of English corpora (using BERT model) and the computational group of TOME now attempts to adapt this approach in the case of NOSCEMUS corpus of early modern scientific Latin (using Latin BERT). For more information, see Vojtěch’s videos – links are above.
III. DAY 3 – Digital-philological Group
- Jo Hedesan – Objectives, Approaches and Results of the Transcription Team & Transkribus training
Jo introduced the objective of her group: Transcribe the printed Latin alchemical corpus between c. 1500 and 1600 (Corpus TOME A), and between 1601 and c. 1700 (Corpus TOME B). After year 1, the group has transcribed a highly curated sample of 16th century alchemy (a catalogue of 140 works, wherefrom c. 70 works transcribed at the moment).
Jo also presented two definitions of alchemy, a narrow one and a tentative broader one, the latter being obviously used when making up the catalogue for the corpus TOME A. Last but not least, Jo introduced the members of her group, the pipeline and standards they proceed with, and the Transcribus recognition model TOME 2.1 she is working on and training at the moment.
Conclusion
The TOME 2nd Team School in Dobřichovice was a wonderful event that fostered collaboration, knowledge-sharing, and innovative approaches across its diverse research groups. Over the three days, participants explored a range of intellectual and computational topics, enriching the collective understanding of early modern metaphors, computational methods, and transcription challenges. The interactive format of workshops, discussions, and presentations created a dynamic environment for both individual growth and team cohesion.
The event not only highlighted the interdisciplinary potential within the TOME project but also reaffirmed the importance of teamwork in addressing complex academic challenges. With the valuable insights gained and the connections strengthened, the team is now better equipped to advance its research goals in the months ahead.
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