Concurring Scripts. Allography in Italy (1000-1800)

Objetivo

In Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ethnic and religious minorities regularly resorted to their own scripts to write local vernaculars, leading to the establishment of non-Latin writing traditions for many European languages. This phenomenon is known as “allography”. Despite its high frequency and cultural relevance, a comprehensive study for its understanding is still lacking. Research so far has been compartmentalized into different disciplines, according to the scripts of the texts, and characterized by a prevailing philological approach.
ConScrIt aspires to a paradigm shift, by applying (historical) sociolinguistics and contact linguistics to a not yet attempted “cross-scriptal” study of allography, bringing together linguistics and philologies of different languages, supported by digital humanities. Its objectives are: 1. to provide a theoretical framework for the origin, evolution, and decline of allographic traditions, as well as for their functions, in relationship to the writers, the readers, their literacies and ethnic/religious identities; 2. to propose a unitary classification of the strategies of adapting a script to a language usually written in another writing system; 3. to analyse the lexicon of the allographic texts, by creating the first thesaurus based on an allographic ‘cross-scriptal’ corpus; 4. to apply digital humanities to the edition of allographic texts and their interpretation.
Italy represents a perfect test bed for this research. The Italian allographic documentation is by far the most varied in the whole Romance-speaking area, including two main traditions, in Hebrew and Greek characters, and single texts in Arabic, Armenian, and Syriac script, across a timespan of eight centuries. At the same time, it is quantitatively inferior to other European corpora, ensuring both data representativeness and research feasibility. It will enable ConScrIt’s groundbreaking research, whose results will be exportable to other geo-historical contexts.