Understanding the Textual Development and the Literary Fortune of the Book of Jubilees through Ages, Languages and across Geographic Regions

Carefully transmitted by some and deliberately erased by others, at times remembered through the centuries, at others completely forgotten and vanished into the unseen, the Book of Jubilees is a second-century BCE apocryphal Jewish text that retells the legendary foundational stories of the Books of Genesis and Exodus with the addition of otherwise unknown details. ""UnderText: UNDERstanding the TEXTual development and the literary fortune of the Book of Jubilees through ages, languages and across geographic regions"" will shed new light on the development and fortune of such an important text focusing on a literally invisible version, a Latin translation preserved in the undertext of a fifth-century palimpsest (i.e. not only a manuscript whose ink has been scraped off but a completely new written artefact (re)fashioned through complex production processes) stored at the Ambrosian Library in Milan.

This Latin translation has been particularly neglected by scholars but can shed precious light in relation to the Hebrew original and the Ge'ez (the classical language of Ethiopia and Eritrea) translation of the Book of Jubilees.

Through palaeographic and codicological analysis and by comparing different translations into multiple languages, the fortunes of the Book of Jubilees in Europe and the history and fate of this Latin palimpsest manuscript will be interwoven throughout the course of the research, and UnderText will shed light on how divergent religious and cultural contexts have reflected variously on common texts and themes.

UnderText will also have social and public implications, triggering reflection on the extremely timely ideas of cancel cultures and will highlight the importance of the traditions of the Jewish minority within the European roots and their interactions with Latin language traditions.