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SIGN-IT – Signacula in Roman and Post-Roman Italy: marking religious and cultural identity (2nd-11th c. CE)

Project description

Unlocking the full historical potential of Italy’s signacula

Across Italy’s diverse regions, historical artefacts known as signacula hold immense cultural significance, yet their dating poses a formidable challenge. These matrices, bearing text, symbols and iconography, span from the Roman Imperial era to the central Middle Ages. However, due to their complex chronology, their historical value has been largely overlooked. With the support of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the SIGN-IT project to unravel the mysteries surrounding these artefacts, aiming to establish a clear dating protocol and delve into their cultural implications throughout Italian history.

Objective

The “SIGN-IT – Signacula in Roman and Post-Roman Italy: marking religious and cultural identity (2nd-11th c. CE)” project aims at studying the cultural history of the Italian peninsula from the Roman Imperial period to the central Middle Ages, by means of the objects known as signacula, i.e. matrices bearing text, signs, and/or iconographic motives, designed to stamp various materials. Linguistic choice is one of the main markers of identity : thus, the project focuses on materials found or originally coming from a sample of Italian regions featuring both Latin and Greek speaking communities: Veneto, Emilia-Romagna, Campania, Apulia, Calabria, Sicily, and Sardinia. The historical value of this body of evidence has been hitherto largely neglected due to its difficult dating. To overcome this issue, I will study for the first time the corpus as a whole, from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. The project’s objectives are three-fold: firstly, to establish a clear dating protocol for the signacula to unlock their full potential as historical sources; secondly, building on the newly-dated material, to study the evolving linguistic patterns, and their contribution to the making of specific local identities, between Antiquity and the Middle Ages; thirdly, to track over the “longue durée” changes in marking practices and to analyse them as proxies for cultural transformations. To achieve these goals, I will build up an open-access database gathering published and unpublished signacula pertaining to the chronological and geographical framework under scrutiny. The database’s structure will allow both qualitative and quantitative analysis of the material, and will facilitate comparisons with other types of stamped writing and of inscribed objects (e.g. seals), by adopting and building upon the technical features and norms of the Text Encoding Initiative standard (TEI, https://tei-c.org/(opens in new window)) developed for the digital edition of ancient inscriptions (EpiDoc) and seals (SigiDoc).

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Topic(s)

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Funding Scheme

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HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships

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Call for proposal

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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2023-PF-01

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Coordinator

ECOLE FRANCAISE DE ROME
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 172 750,08
Address
PIAZZA FARNESE 67
00186 Roma
Italy

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Region
Centro (IT) Lazio Roma
Activity type
Research Organisations
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Total cost

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