Italian Poetry in Latin

From The Digital Classicist Wiki
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Italian Poetry in Latin. Exploring texts of Latin poetry composed in Italy between 1250-1550

Available

Description

The Italian Poetry in Latin Project was conceived in 1999 with the aim of locating, assessing, collating and computerising Latin poems produced in Italy or in Italian cultural environments during the period starting from around the birth of Dante until the first half of the sixteenth century. Poems by famous authors and anonymous texts of all kinds, published in printed editions (occasionally recent and painstaking, but more often antiquated and unmethodical), or transferred from library manuscripts and paper editions having a limited circulation (for example graduate theses, which until a few years ago were still being written on typewriters), or left unseen in the folios of codices: all of these texts are gradually being transferred into computerised archives, with a verbal annexe research engine that consents instant access and direct enquiry.

The choice of examining a temporal segment, together with the close analogy of the criteria employed for textual criticism, plus the characteristics of the programme’s structure and modality of function, make this work the natural continuation of a pair of indexes that have come out on disk in the last couple of years dedicated to the versification of the ancient, classical, late-ancient and medieval ages: Poesis2. CD-Rom dei testi della poesia latina (Bologna 1999, 1st ed. 1995) and PoetriaNova. A CD-Rom of Latin Medieval Poetry, 650-1250 A. D. (Florence 2001). Thus the field open to a rapid and secure intertextual search is being greatly extended, spanning eighteen centuries of poetic production, from the remote origins of Rome’s literary language up to the Italian flourishing Humanism and Renaissance. This initiative, which has been classified “research of national interest” by the Italian Ministero dell’Istruzione, Università e Ricerca, is supported by funding from the ‘Ezio Franceschini’ Foundation in Florence and the ‘Cassa di Risparmio di Venezia’ Foundation in Venice.