The project represents a major advancement with respect to the state of the art in the study of medieval Sicilian literature. It constitutes the first sustained scholarly venue in which specialists from five distinct disciplines engage in an ongoing, structured, and deeply informed exchange focused specifically on the multilingual literary history of medieval Sicily.
The team brings together a Byzantinist, a Latinist, an Italianist, two Arabists (one historian and one literary scholar), a Hebraist, and two PhD students (working respectively on Provençal and Arabic literature). On a biweekly basis, the team meets to discuss secondary scholarship, primary sources, and individual research findings, with the explicit aim of constructing a shared epistemological framework for the interpretation of a multilingual poetic corpus.
After two and a half years of continuous collaboration, this shared epistemology is not only clearly perceptible but fully operational. The team now works as an integrated intellectual collective, developing new and unprecedented approaches to the poetic materials, understood not as isolated traditions but as a coherent, interconnected corpus. This shared conceptual framework enables the systematic tracing of correspondences, motifs, and aesthetic strategies that had previously remained invisible or marginalised within discipline-specific scholarship.
At the academic level, the project reshapes the study of medieval literature by foregrounding Sicily as a laboratory of sustained multilingual poetic interaction and by integrating Arabic and Hebrew materials into the mainstream narratives of European literary history. Methodologically, it advances the fields of comparative literature, medieval studies, and digital humanities by combining traditional philological rigor with computational and network-based modes of analysis.
Beyond academia, the project has significant cultural and educational impact. Through public-facing activities—such as concert-lectures, exhibitions, outreach events, and online resources—it promotes a historically grounded understanding of cultural plurality and exchange in the medieval Mediterranean. In doing so, it offers a nuanced and evidence-based counter-narrative to simplified or exclusionary accounts of European cultural heritage.
To ensure long-term uptake and success, several elements are crucial:
Further research: the analytical framework and digital infrastructure developed by the project are explicitly designed to be extensible, allowing future comparative work on other regions, periods, and multilingual corpora beyond Sicily.
Digital sustainability: continued institutional support will be required to maintain, update, and expand the digital platform, ensuring long-term accessibility and interoperability with other research infrastructures.
Internationalisation: further dissemination through international research networks, partnerships with libraries and cultural institutions, and integration into global initiatives will maximise the project’s impact.
Education and public engagement: adapting selected materials for use in university teaching, secondary education, museums, and cultural programmes will further enhance societal uptake.
In sum, the project delivers a coherent and integrated body of textual, analytical, and digital results that fundamentally redefine the literary history of medieval Sicily and demonstrate the central role of cross-cultural exchange in the formation of European poetic traditions. Its outputs are conceived not merely as final results, but as a durable platform for future research, teaching, and public engagement.
