An English Teacher in Paris: John of Garland’s Dictionarius and Medieval Language Learning

John of Garland’s Dictionarius (composed c. 1220) is a discursive lexicographic work intended to teach Latin. John was an Englishman but taught at the universities of Paris and Toulouse in the thirteenth century. In the Dictionarius, John takes his students on a virtual tour of Paris and describes the market stalls and their goods, as well as many other things to be seen in and around the town. The main text of the Dictionarius is in Latin but contains many glosses in medieval French, English and other languages. The project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, aims to create a parallel digital edition of the glosses.

The Dictionarius survives in over 30 manuscripts scattered across 19 libraries in Britain and Europe, and its popularity and high level of adaptation by its readers results in a complex and variable text. This project is the first to collate all manuscript versions of the Dictionarius using digital humanities techniques to create a searchable online database of the text, multilingual commentary and glosses. This resource will allow the team to interrogate the text in new ways, enabling us to compare the specialized lexis over time (the extant manuscripts reflect language use between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries) and space (they capture the language used across northern France, Englandand the Low Countries). Lexicological and philological methods will underpin the linguistic analysis, centring on the vocabulary of specialized arts and crafts domains, and their changing lexis and languages as newmultilingual audiences adapted the text.

By creating a digital edition of the text, commentary and glosses, we can evaluate the treatment of this important text by copyists and glossators in different times and communities. Our outputs will redefine our understanding of the interaction of Latin and vernaculars in the period, expand our understanding of glossing as a cultural practice, and benefit scholars of Garland's works and historians of education and linguistics. The Dictionarius's everyday and craft-specific vocabulary will interest public audiences.

Project website: blog.westminster.ac.uk/jog/

Frontend

• Next.js (App Router) — application framework for routing, server/client rendering, and build pipeline.
• React — UI component model for pages, layouts, and interactive search experiences.
• Tailwind CSS — utility-first styling for layout, typography, and responsive design.
• SWR — cache-aware data fetching hooks for search requests and UI state.
• Axios — HTTP client used to call backend APIs from the frontend.
• Font Awesome — icon set used in UI controls and status indicators.

Backend Integration

• FastAPI backend — serves search APIs and integrates with the TEI processing pipeline.
• TEI XML parsing and search endpoints exposed to the frontend — transforms TEI manuscripts into searchable records for the UI.
• PostgreSQL database — primary data store for indexed TEI content and metadata.

Tooling

• ESLint (Next.js config) — linting rules and code quality checks.
• PostCSS — CSS processing pipeline used by Tailwind.
• npm scripts for dev/build/start — local development, production build, and runtime commands.
• GitHub (version control) — source control and collaboration.
• PM2 (process manager) — keeps Node.js and Python services running in production.

Infrastructure

• Ubuntu (server OS) — base server environment.
• Nginx (reverse proxy) — routes traffic to the Next.js frontend and FastAPI backend.
• Node.js — runtime for the Next.js frontend server.
• Python — runtime for the FastAPI backend services.

A fundamental step of the project is to create transcriptions of all manuscripts with XML markup, including language tagging (language / dialect of lexeme, link to headword in relevant dictionaries, lexeme-gloss link), alongside metadata about the date (of manuscript, earliest citation of lexeme), ownership, production and localisation. The database will enable researchers to link the multilingual commentary and gloss material to the base text, allowing data from numerous manuscripts to be queried and visualized across linguistic, temporal and geographical boundaries.

Principle investigator: Dr Heather Pagan (University of Westminster)

International Co-Investigator: PD Dr. Annina Seiler (University of Zurich)