SIGN-IT – Signacula in Roman and Post-Roman Italy: marking religious and cultural identity (2nd-11th c. CE)

The “SIGN-IT – Signacula in Roman and Post-Roman Italy: marking religious and cultural identity (2nd-11th c.

CE)” project aims at studying the cultural history of the Italian peninsula from the Roman Imperial period to the central Middle Ages, by means of the objects known as signacula, i.e. matrices bearing text, signs, and/or iconographic motives, designed to stamp various materials.

Linguistic choice is one of the main markers of identity : thus, the project focuses on materials found or originally coming from a sample of Italian regions featuring both Latin and Greek speaking communities: Veneto, Emilia-Romagna, Campania, Apulia, Calabria, Sicily, and Sardinia. The historical value of this body of evidence has been hitherto largely neglected due to its difficult dating.

To overcome this issue, I will study for the first time the corpus as a whole, from Antiquity to the Middle Ages.

The project’s objectives are three-fold: firstly, to establish a clear dating protocol for the signacula to unlock their full potential as historical sources; secondly, building on the newly-dated material, to study the evolving linguistic patterns, and their contribution to the making of specific local identities, between Antiquity and the Middle Ages; thirdly, to track over the “longue durée” changes in marking practices and to analyse them as proxies for cultural transformations.

To achieve these goals, I will build up an open-access database gathering published and unpublished signacula pertaining to the chronological and geographical framework under scrutiny.

The database’s structure will allow both qualitative and quantitative analysis of the material, and will facilitate comparisons with other types of stamped writing and of inscribed objects (e.g., seals), by adopting and building upon the technical features and norms of the Text Encoding Initiative standard (TEI, https://tei-c.org/), developed for the digital edition of ancient inscriptions (EpiDoc) and seals (SigiDoc).