Digital Lemmatized Edition of Prose 2 (Franco-Italian prosification of Benoît de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie)

The project aims to produce a lemmatized diplomatic digital edition of a hitherto unpublished text of the Franco-Italian Middle Ages, the second mise en prose of Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie or Prose 2 (ante 1289). 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 typology of the proposed edition is a digital diplomatic edition allowing the manipulation of the text for the purposes of linguistic analysis, in particular lemmatization, and the creation of a dictionary of Prose 2, to be also included in the DiFrI-Dictionary of the Franco-Italian, a project based at Padua University.

With respect to her background as a researcher, this fellowship will have a crucial impact on the career of the applicant, offering concrete possibilities to attain an academic position.

The activities planned during this two-year fellowship (organization of two workshop and one international conference) will allow to significantly bolster her CV, whose key strength is currently represented by individual research activity.