Periodic Reporting for period 1 - SIQILLIYA (Debunking Eurocentric Literary History: Poetry Across Borders in Medieval Sicily)
Période du rapport: 2023-09-01 au 2026-02-28
Medieval Sicily: where European lyric was born
Medieval Sicily was one of the most vibrant cultural crossroads of the Mediterranean. Between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, poets wrote in Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and Romance, sharing the same courts, cities, and intellectual spaces. Sicily was not a periphery, but a multilingual engine of literary innovation.
From this extraordinary environment emerged the Scuola Siciliana, the first poets to write lyric verse in a Romance vernacular — the starting point of Italian literature and a decisive influence on Dante and Petrarch. Yet this origin story has long been told as a purely European, monolingual tale, overlooking centuries of Arabic, Hebrew, and Greek poetry that shaped Sicily’s cultural landscape.
This project rewrites that story.
For the first time, it brings together all the poetic traditions of medieval Sicily and studies them as a single, interconnected corpus. By reading Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and Romance poetry side by side, the project reveals how images, themes, and poetic ideas travelled across languages, religions, and communities. The result is a new vision of European literary history: one rooted in coexistence, exchange, and creativity across cultures. By uncovering Sicily’s hidden role in the making of European lyric, the project offers a powerful reminder that cultural diversity is not a modern add-on — it is a foundation.
Medieval Sicily was one of the most vibrant cultural crossroads of the Mediterranean. Between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, poets wrote in Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and Romance, sharing the same courts, cities, and intellectual spaces. Sicily was not a periphery, but a multilingual engine of literary innovation.
From this extraordinary environment emerged the Scuola Siciliana, the first poets to write lyric verse in a Romance vernacular — the starting point of Italian literature and a decisive influence on Dante and Petrarch. Yet this origin story has long been told as a purely European, monolingual tale, overlooking centuries of Arabic, Hebrew, and Greek poetry that shaped Sicily’s cultural landscape.
This project rewrites that story.
For the first time, it brings together all the poetic traditions of medieval Sicily and studies them as a single, interconnected corpus. By reading Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and Romance poetry side by side, the project reveals how images, themes, and poetic ideas travelled across languages, religions, and communities. The result is a new vision of European literary history: one rooted in coexistence, exchange, and creativity across cultures. By uncovering Sicily’s hidden role in the making of European lyric, the project offers a powerful reminder that cultural diversity is not a modern add-on — it is a foundation.
Project highlights
The project has achieved a major first: the complete digital critical edition and English translation of all known medieval Sicilian court poetry in Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and Romance (10th–13th centuries). For the first time, these traditions can be read and studied together as a single multilingual corpus. Building on this foundation, the team identified shared keywords, images, and motifs across the five languages. Mapping these patterns revealed a common cultural horizon, where poetic, philosophical, medical, and social ideas circulated across linguistic and religious boundaries. This work has produced a new framework for understanding Sicilian poetry as the result of sustained intercultural exchange. The project operates as an integrated research collective, with regular collaboration driving a genuinely shared approach to interpretation. Its results have been disseminated through international conferences, public events, and peer-reviewed publications, establishing a strong global profile. The results have been disseminated in conference worldwide and in open-access publications in top-tier journals.
Looking ahead, an open-access digital platform is in development to share texts, translations, and analytical tools with scholars, students, and the wider public. With its core objectives met and dissemination underway, the project stands as a landmark rethinking of medieval literature and Europe’s multicultural past.
The project has achieved a major first: the complete digital critical edition and English translation of all known medieval Sicilian court poetry in Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and Romance (10th–13th centuries). For the first time, these traditions can be read and studied together as a single multilingual corpus. Building on this foundation, the team identified shared keywords, images, and motifs across the five languages. Mapping these patterns revealed a common cultural horizon, where poetic, philosophical, medical, and social ideas circulated across linguistic and religious boundaries. This work has produced a new framework for understanding Sicilian poetry as the result of sustained intercultural exchange. The project operates as an integrated research collective, with regular collaboration driving a genuinely shared approach to interpretation. Its results have been disseminated through international conferences, public events, and peer-reviewed publications, establishing a strong global profile. The results have been disseminated in conference worldwide and in open-access publications in top-tier journals.
Looking ahead, an open-access digital platform is in development to share texts, translations, and analytical tools with scholars, students, and the wider public. With its core objectives met and dissemination underway, the project stands as a landmark rethinking of medieval literature and Europe’s multicultural past.
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.
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.