Periodic Reporting for period 2 - PAGES (Priscian’s Ars grammatica in European Scriptoria. A Millennium of Latin and Greek Scholarship)
Reporting period: 2022-07-01 to 2023-12-31
The purpose of the PAGES project is to study Priscian’s Ars grammatica, i.e. the major work on Latin linguistics of Antiquity (Constantinople, beginning of the 6th century), in order to provide the scholarly community in the fields of textual scholarship and linguistics with a new critical edition of the text, grounded on a more accurate analysis of a much wider documentary basis, with the first translation of the work in a modern language, and with a digital infrastructure on Priscian’s text, tradition, sources, and reception. This research is relevant for the community of scholars working not only on the history of the Latin language and literature and on the origin and dissemination of logic in the Middle Ages, but also, due to the presence in the text of many passages and quotations in Greek, on the knowledge of the Greek language in Western Europe between Late Antiquity and the Renaissance. Therefore, we are studying this fundamental text with a multidisciplinary approach: as the fruit of the earlier Greek and Latin grammatical tradition and of the philosophical speculation in the field of linguistics, as a container of quotations from Latin and Greek literary authors, and as a source of knowledge regarding Latin and Greek language and linguistic theories in the centuries following its publication, up to the present day. In addition, we study the dissemination of this text and the profound influence it exerted in Western Europe, particularly as a stimulus to the learning of the Greek language, both in the early Middle Ages, through the transcription of Greek characters and the glossing work done on the text, and in the Humanistic Age. In this perspective, we are carrying out a careful study of the oldest manuscripts containing the Ars (8th-10th centuries: approx. 80 items), including fragments and palimpsests, and of the earliest printed editions (up to 1605: approx. 70 items), in which the damaged Greek parts of the text were restored or replaced. The PAGES team is composed by nine philologists, two paleographers, two physicists expert of digital imaging of the cultural heritage: all the results of the multidisciplinary research will be presented in the PAGES digital platform.
In the period since the project began, the working group has devoted itself to examining the medieval manuscript tradition of the Ars. The two paleographers have already inspected (both in situ and through digital reproductions) and analytically described most of the eighty 8th-10th-century manuscripts, fragments, and palimpsests of the Ars; the two experts in digital imaging took multi-spectral photographs of the most difficult-to-read codices and palimpsests; the philologists collated all the concerned textual witnesses. With the data from the manuscript collation (lists of errors common to several witnesses), it was possible to assess the genealogical relationships among the manuscripts and represent them in a tree (stemma codicum). We understood that the work, because of its length, was transmitted in separate tomes (books 1-7, 8-16, 17-18): each of them had a different path of transmission, which must therefore be described with a different stemma. On the basis of the collected materials, the philologists responsible for the edition of the text are drafting the new text of the Ars and the related critical apparatus, containing the significant variants found in the tradition. On the other hand, a philologist expert in the Greek language is collating the 15th-16th-century printed editions of the Ars to examine the Greek examples and quotations that the Humanists substituted for those damaged in the course of the manuscript tradition. The results of these inquiries have been already presented in conferences, seminars, and articles, published or in press.
At the same time, a great deal of work has been carried out in the creation of the database and digital platform of the PAGES project: it constitutes the core of the larger digital infrastructure of the Latin Grammarians Collection, for which a specific data-entry system and textual critical and linguistic markup suitable for this genre of texts and manuscripts has been developed. One section of the database is devoted to the scientific description of the manuscripts, while the other will accommodate the text together with the apparatus of variants and that of sources and parallel passages, the transcription of the passages in Greek, of the quotations from Latin fragmentary works, and of the glosses to the Greek terms as they appear in each manuscript; finally, the text is marked up in such a way as to make it possible to search for the terms and topics covered by the grammarian.
At the same time, a great deal of work has been carried out in the creation of the database and digital platform of the PAGES project: it constitutes the core of the larger digital infrastructure of the Latin Grammarians Collection, for which a specific data-entry system and textual critical and linguistic markup suitable for this genre of texts and manuscripts has been developed. One section of the database is devoted to the scientific description of the manuscripts, while the other will accommodate the text together with the apparatus of variants and that of sources and parallel passages, the transcription of the passages in Greek, of the quotations from Latin fragmentary works, and of the glosses to the Greek terms as they appear in each manuscript; finally, the text is marked up in such a way as to make it possible to search for the terms and topics covered by the grammarian.
In each of the fields in which the PAGES group has worked, important advances over the state of the art have been produced. In the field of the paleographic description new discoveries have been made: parts of the same manuscript, preserved in different libraries, have been recognized as originally belonging to the same codex; a more precise dating and localization of many witnesses could be given; several hands of copyists and adnotators were identified; and marginal notes dating from the schola of the grammarian were discovered. In the area of digital imaging, images have been produced that make it possible to collate witnesses that were previously unreadable and analyse their script. In the philological sphere, the new text of the Ars improves in innumerable points that of the previous critical edition, by Martin Hertz (1855-1859), which was based on rather late witnesses, that Hertz employed without even trying to assess their genealogical relationships and that now prove to be of scarce value. The apparatus of sources and parallel passages, completely rewritten and supplemented, takes into account the recurrence of the same quotations used by Priscian in all Latin grammatical texts from the origins to the entire ninth century, allowing for a broad examination of the relationships within the late antique and medieval Latin grammatical tradition. The study of Greek interpolations in Humanistic editions casts light on the places, moments, and persons involved, as far as Priscian is concerned, in the revival of the study of the Greek language and literature first in Italy and then in France in 15th-16th centuries. The creation of the database and digital markup of the text offers the possibility of broad fruition of the project’s results and of research on grammatical texts at a level not previously achieved by text-only databases.
In the coming months the results already achieved will be refined and published, and the digital infrastructure will be implemented and made accessible for consultation. In addition, progress will be made in two more directions indicated in the Description of action, namely, the publication of the fragmentary Greek syntactic lexicon that was among Priscian’s sources and the collection and publication of Carolingian glosses to Greek terms. We will continue to present the results of the research in conferences, seminars, and publications, especially preparing the planned volumes of the Collectanea grammatica Latina series (Olms).
In the coming months the results already achieved will be refined and published, and the digital infrastructure will be implemented and made accessible for consultation. In addition, progress will be made in two more directions indicated in the Description of action, namely, the publication of the fragmentary Greek syntactic lexicon that was among Priscian’s sources and the collection and publication of Carolingian glosses to Greek terms. We will continue to present the results of the research in conferences, seminars, and publications, especially preparing the planned volumes of the Collectanea grammatica Latina series (Olms).