Periodic Reporting for period 1 - PRODIGI (Digital Lemmatized Edition of Prose 2 (Franco-Italian prosification of Benoît de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie))
Reporting period: 2021-02-01 to 2023-01-31
The project PRODIGI has produced a native digital lemmatized edition of a hitherto unpublished text of the Franco-Italian Middle Ages, the second mise en prose of Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s "Roman de Troie" or "Prose 2" (ante 1298), from the manuscript Grenoble Bibl. Municipale 861, an important witness of "Prose 2" and a fascinating historical artifact. The interest of "Prose 2" lies, among other things, in being an original French text written in Italy (Veneto). It is therefore a particularly significant witness of the Franco-Italian textual and linguistic galaxy, which has seen a renewed interest over the past decade, especially with regard to the contribution made by Italian scribes in the spread of Medieval French literature. Finally, from the point of view of cultural history, "Prose 2" is a key component of the Italian reception of the Trojan narrative, a complex panorama that is still being defined in detail. From this perspective, the Paduan-Venetian region between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries shows a singular receptivity: several cities, primarily Venice and Padua, endorse a mythology of origins entirely based on the world of Trojan heroes. As Trojan history becomes integrated into urban historiography, this “familiarity with the ancient” contributes to the later emergence of a cultural attitude known as “Veneto pre-humanism”. The choice of the witness fell on the ms. Grenoble for its remarkable cultural value: this manuscript is the work of a copyist-prisoner, and it is one of the witnesses attributed with certainty to these unusual ateliers since it is explicitly signed; it was commissioned by the podestà of Padua, that is the highest political authority. The studies on the reception of the "Roman de Troie" in Veneto have highlighted a peculiar receptivity of the late fourteenth-
century Padua for Trojan narrative. The ms. Grenoble represents therefore a first emergence of a trend that will fully emerge in the following century. Finally, we must mention the importance, for urban identity, of the myth of Padua’s foundation by the Trojan hero Antenor.
This project have had two main objectives: (1) the complete edition of "Prose 2", that remains understudied, above all due to the lack of editions; (2) the linguistic study of the ms. Grenoble, since "Prose 2" is a very significant text for Franco-Italian studies as it belongs to the category of original French works written in Italy. From these first results, the next step, in the future, it will be the in-depth comparison between the mise en prose and the versified roman, in order to detail the cultural project and the working
methodology of the prosificator with respect to the poem, and identify at least the stemmatic family of the version used as the basis for prosification. This latter element will consistently contribute to the picture of "Roman de Troie" circulation (manuscripts and textual versions) in north-eastern Italy.
century Padua for Trojan narrative. The ms. Grenoble represents therefore a first emergence of a trend that will fully emerge in the following century. Finally, we must mention the importance, for urban identity, of the myth of Padua’s foundation by the Trojan hero Antenor.
This project have had two main objectives: (1) the complete edition of "Prose 2", that remains understudied, above all due to the lack of editions; (2) the linguistic study of the ms. Grenoble, since "Prose 2" is a very significant text for Franco-Italian studies as it belongs to the category of original French works written in Italy. From these first results, the next step, in the future, it will be the in-depth comparison between the mise en prose and the versified roman, in order to detail the cultural project and the working
methodology of the prosificator with respect to the poem, and identify at least the stemmatic family of the version used as the basis for prosification. This latter element will consistently contribute to the picture of "Roman de Troie" circulation (manuscripts and textual versions) in north-eastern Italy.
The project envisaged an intense study of the problems related to the complete linguistic annotation (lemma, POS, MSD) of texts characterized by a strong complexity as they belong to a stage of formation of the Romance languages, i.e. the medieval era.
The results:
a. the creation of a very complex digital diplomatic edition fully lemmatized and linguistically annotated (POS and MSD), taking into account all the peculiarities of Medieval writing; all these encoded phenomena can be the subject of a search within the text, allowing the extraction of statistical data;
b. the creation of a new lemmatizer, ULA (Universal Language Annotarion), open source, characterized by the possibility of being easily customizable by the user
c, the creation of the interface for the visualization of the editions and the lemmatized texts, and the creation of the site structure.
Thanks to the tools created during the project, the textual corpus has been further enriched: from one to three texts.
Dissemination:
a. project results are visible through the site PRODIGI. Archivio informatizzato del "Roman de Troie en Prose 2" (Italia, XIII sec.) (http://martamaterni.it/prodigi.html)(opens in new window);
b. an academic blog was activated, connecting to previous Marie Curie project, to offer theoretical reflections concerning the application of digital technology to Medieval textuality: Florimont et Troie numériques. Textualité médiévale et textualité numérique ISSN 2646-0742(opens in new window);
c. all the files and tools produced were been stored in the GitHub repository https://github.com/mmaterni(opens in new window);
d. a key moment for the dissemination was the organization of the one-day conference "Autour de Troie - Fortleben. Impregnarsi di Omero attraverso le epoche e attraverso i generi" (Padova, 1 December 2022), that brought together 10 speakers. A second one-day international conference will have place in Padua at the end of June 2023: "Autour de Troie - Nel nome di Busa. Lemmatizzare e poi?".
The results:
a. the creation of a very complex digital diplomatic edition fully lemmatized and linguistically annotated (POS and MSD), taking into account all the peculiarities of Medieval writing; all these encoded phenomena can be the subject of a search within the text, allowing the extraction of statistical data;
b. the creation of a new lemmatizer, ULA (Universal Language Annotarion), open source, characterized by the possibility of being easily customizable by the user
c, the creation of the interface for the visualization of the editions and the lemmatized texts, and the creation of the site structure.
Thanks to the tools created during the project, the textual corpus has been further enriched: from one to three texts.
Dissemination:
a. project results are visible through the site PRODIGI. Archivio informatizzato del "Roman de Troie en Prose 2" (Italia, XIII sec.) (http://martamaterni.it/prodigi.html)(opens in new window);
b. an academic blog was activated, connecting to previous Marie Curie project, to offer theoretical reflections concerning the application of digital technology to Medieval textuality: Florimont et Troie numériques. Textualité médiévale et textualité numérique ISSN 2646-0742(opens in new window);
c. all the files and tools produced were been stored in the GitHub repository https://github.com/mmaterni(opens in new window);
d. a key moment for the dissemination was the organization of the one-day conference "Autour de Troie - Fortleben. Impregnarsi di Omero attraverso le epoche e attraverso i generi" (Padova, 1 December 2022), that brought together 10 speakers. A second one-day international conference will have place in Padua at the end of June 2023: "Autour de Troie - Nel nome di Busa. Lemmatizzare e poi?".
The project has produced a digital and fully lemmatized scholarly edition of an overlooked text of the vernacular European Middle Ages: the second mise en prose of the "Roman de Troie" or "Prose 2". The edition and lemmatization have been complemented by a methodological reflection on the feasibility of new digital tools and the availability and applicability of existing ones with respect to Medieval vernacular texts characterized by extreme linguistic variation. The project made it possible to draw up a status questionis on lemmatization tools and annotation standards, with reference to the complexity of the medieval stage of the Romance languages. Linguistically "Prose 2" represents an extreme case, that is the contamination between two linguistic systems, the French and the Italian one; but at the same time it is not an isolated case, because the Franco-Italian one is a real literary galaxy with respect to which studies are multiplying. The results obtained are therefore not only valid for the text under examination, but can contribute to the realization of the many initiatives underway which have this linguistic variety as their object, first of all the creation of the Franco-Italian Dictionary promoted by the University of Padua. The PRODIGI project has therefore made available to the community a new tool, open-source and easily modifiable by the user: the ULA lemmatizer. Furthermore, with reference to the literary theme of the text analysed, i.e. the history of Troy, the project made it possible to inaugurate a permanent seminar, "Autour de Troie - Fortleben", dedicated to the reception of the Homeric theme in Europe from the Middle Ages to the contemporary age. The multidisciplinary character of this research and the planned intensive training focused on Digital Humanities have allowed the applicant to present herself to the academic world with a profile that is currently highly required but still not widely available: the Humanities researcher able to independently design and manage a DH project.