About PAGES

Title of the project: Priscian’s Ars Grammatica in European Scriptoria

P.I.: Michela Rosellini (Sapienza Università di Roma)

Participants: Ilaria Andolfi, Andrea Bramanti, Andrea Consalvi, Anna Candida Felici, Claudio Giammona, Anna Gioffreda, Ivan Ilari, Jacopo Khalil, Charles Kuper, Elisa Nuria Merisio, Paolo Monella, Ilaria Morresi, Martina Pavoni, Michela Perino, Camilla Poloni, Chiara Rosso, Maria Grazia Schiaroli, Malamatenia Vlachou, and Elena Spangenberg Yanes.

Fundings: European Research Council

Abstract: written at the beginning of the 6^th century AD in the bilingual context of Constantinople, the Ars Prisciani, in 18 books, is the last and greatest Latin grammar handbook of Antiquity. Bringing together the inheritance of Latin and Greek grammatical traditions, it stands as a milestone in the history of linguistic speculation and is an important source of fragments of lost literary works. The deep impact of this text on European culture falls beyond its original scope. Conceived to teach Latin to Greek speakers, in the early Middle Ages (8^th-10^th centuries) and during the Renaissance (15^th-16^th centuries) the Ars turned out, due to its great amount of Greek passages, to stimulate the study of Greek by Western scholars. The peculiar East-Western transmission of the Ars can now be exploited and thoroughly illustrated thanks to the progress of digital philology. PAGES aims both to supersede Hertz’s outdated and unreliable edition (1855-59) and, in a broader perspective, to reconstruct Priscian’s key role not only in the revival of Latin in 9^th-century Europe but also in the practice of Greek script and language in Carolingian scriptoria, in the renaissance of Greek philological studies in the Humanistic Age, and in the history of linguistic education in Europe. The project tackles these challenges with a multidisciplinary approach, gathering experts in textual criticism, digital humanities, palaeography and multispectral imaging, history of linguistics, and medieval and humanistic scholarship. PAGES will build an open source digital scholarly resource on the text, the tradition, and the reception of Priscian. The infrastructure will make available the results of the systematic census of medieval manuscripts and early printed editions, including the comprehensive inquiry about the Greek script and glosses in Priscian’s 8^th-10^th-centuries manuscripts as well as about the emendations and interpolations in 15^th-16^th-centuries manuscripts and printed editions.