RICERCA ITALIANA     

Musisque deoque II. A dynamic digital archive of Latin poetry, from its origins to the Italian Renaissance.

Università "Ca' Foscari" di Venezia

Abstract

The project described hereunder is the continuation of the 2005 PRIN, "Musisque Deoque. A digital archive of Latin poetry, from its origins to the Italian Renaissance". Its aim is the creation of a universally consultable online digital archive containing all Latin verse from its origins to 1600 ca., edited thanks to a revision of existent scientific works on the subject, and provided with apparatus criticus and a highly sophisticated word-retrieving system.
The Musisque deoque archive (from now on referred to as MQDQ) is in the first place for the benefit of those members of the Italian and international scientific community engaged in research on the formal development of Latin verse, on the processes of its tradition and consistency in style and techniques of expression, and on the ways in which processes of re-use and intertextuality have evolved. More in general, MQDQ offers a broad, innovative and scientifically sound work tool for all those interested in studying the ancient, medieval and humanistic texts of Latin poetry from the point of view of their models and of the history of their success; this will be achieved by analysing the elements of formal continuity connecting them to the whole tradition, both preceding and subsequent. On a practical level, MQDQ offers itself as a tool particularly useful and versatile for intertextual research, studies in poetic imitation, analysis of stylistics or linguistics, commentaries and textual criticism.
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Principal Investigator

Paolo Mastandrea Università "Ca' Foscari" di VENEZIA

Research Objectives

By creating a digital library with highly distinctive features, the project “Musisque Deoque” has the two-fold aim of treating the vast heritage of Latin verse as a whole, and of submitting all of the texts to a new metrical markup method detailed down to each single verse, at the same time adding an apparatus criticus answering to specific criteria. The final product will be a versatile tool, useful in any type of linguistic and philological research, but especially for historical-literary investigation.
The texts published (with few exceptions) will be based on standard editions of proven reliability and authority. The novelty of the project lies in the rewriting of the apparatus, not conceived as a synopsis of previous editions, but as an exhaustive outline of the ways texts have been handed down along the centuries, and of the forms in which the works of ancient authors have been disclosed to so many generations of readers during the Imperial period, the darker and less Dark Ages, and the Humanist era. Not deeming it necessary to publish the mass of data from the manuscript tradition, we shall select an apparatus of “significant” variants (some of which attributable to the author or a posthumous editor, others the work of readers and copyists starting from the most ancient phase of trasmission), useful to outline a history of the circulation of texts and of their reception on the part of subsequent authors.
The main concept, by now fairly generally accepted >>>

First Results

At the end of the biennium the following goals shall be attained:

1) construction of sophisticated software for inserting critical apparatus in a digital archive of texts of Latin poetry;

2) online publication of a vast corpus – text-retrievable thanks to a search engine – of Latin poetry from its origins to the Renaissance, a portion of which will be provided with digital apparatus in turn open to online word search.

In the meantime, and according to the protocols and examples set by the Parma research unit, all groups taking part in the project will have laid the foundations for a network of bibliographical archives accessible to the whole scientific community: a sort of «scattered library» organised according to common criteria and located in the various universities, each of which shall have responsibility and custody for one or more specific sectors.

As was the case during the first «Musisque Deoque» PRIN in 2005, conventions on themes relevant to the project (methods for digital editorial work, history of text tradition, intertextuality in the classical literatures and the literary system) shall prove to be so many opportunities for debate and scientific advancement, thus contributing to the updating of philology in the era of new digital technologies.

Timescale

24 months

National and international background

It might be said that today the panorama of Latin literary works published (or in any case accessible) in digital form is quite satisfying. Even without taking into account projects which have got lost on the way, in a few years a vast treasury of sources has been made available for readers, both on CD-ROM and online; this inventory is exhaustive as far as the archaic and classic periods are concerned, rather less so as to late antiquity and the Middle Ages, while incomplete if not fortuitous for the Humanistic, modern and Neo-Latin stages. Many different methods for organising the collection of the works have been experimented: at times the pages of paper standard editions from preexisting series were digitised en bloc (such is the case of Patrologia Latina, Corpus Christianorum, Bibliotheca Teubneriana, Monumenta Germaniae Historica etc.), in other occasions new textual corpora, concealing themselves to the view of the net surfer as if behind unfathomable doors, were created (Bibliotheca Augustana, Latin Library, IntraText etc.); or, again, works were stored by theme or type (in the widest possible meaning of the word: e.g. all epigraphic or papyrus materials), or collected according to geographic-cultural areas, eras and segments of time. In this respect, we feel the custom currently prevailing of presenting works in chronological order - rather than in the alphabetical by author and works widely preferred in the era of "e-incunabula" such as the Thesaurus >>>