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.
