Medieval Latin Literature and its extensions all over the world

What is it about?

The textual heritage of Medieval Latin is one of the greatest reservoirs of human culture. Repertories list more than 16,000 authors from about 20 modern countries. Until now, there has been no introduction to this world in its full geographical extension. Forty contributors fill this gap by adopting a new perspective, making available to specialists (but also to the interested public) new materials and insights. The project presents an overview of Medieval (and post-medieval) Latin Literatures as a global phenomenon including both Europe and extra-European regions. It serves as an introduction to medieval Latin’s complex and multi-layered culture, whose attraction has been underestimated until now. Traditional overviews mostly flatten specificities, yet in many countries medieval Latin literature is still studied with reference to the local history. Thus the first section presents 20 regional surveys, including chapters on authors and works of Latin Literature in Eastern, Central and Northern Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the Americas. Subsequent chapters highlight shared patterns of circulation, adaptation, and exchange, and underline the appeal of medieval intermediality, as evidenced in manuscripts, maps, scientific treatises and iconotexts, and its performativity in narrations, theatre, sermons and music. The last section deals with literary “interfaces,” that is motifs or characters that exemplify the double-sided or the long-term transformations of medieval Latin mythologemes in vernacular culture, both early modern and modern, such as the legends about King Arthur, Faust, and Hamlet

Featured Image

Photo by Manuel Torres Garcia on Unsplash

Photo by Manuel Torres Garcia on Unsplash

Why is it important?

In the mental libraries of European citizens the Middle Ages is almost always the great absentee. Especially the Latin Middle Ages. Obscuring the textual memory of the Middle Ages in school programs and university curricula leaves unexplored an immense heritage of inventions, stories, chronicles, meditations, fables, treatises, visions, lyrics, facts, places and emotions: this heritage lies behind Dantes' Comedy and Boccaccio's Decameron, Malory's Le morte d'Arthur, with its modern rewritings, until the Game of Thrones, and Shakespeare's Hamlet, and is coherent and complementary to the architectural and artistic Middle Ages which instead we all frequent and which still identifies the cultural identity of Europe. Behind the cathedrals of Florence and Köln, Notre Dame of Paris and the York Minster, St. Basil's of Moscow and the Scrovegni Chapel, the Alcazar of Seville and the Sé Velha of Coimbra, behind and before the crown of Stephen of Hungary and the legendary animals of the bestiaries, the stories of Shakespeare and the fantasy sagas there is an imagery that the French historical school began to explore on the few documents accessible but it will not belong to the Western consciousness as long as the literature that convey it will be known in its outline and the text become readable in the current languages ​​of Western citizens. Knowledge of Latin, the unifying root of twentieth-century education, progressively loses ground even among medieval science professionals, and even the few experts of this language would find it difficult to find a Medieval Latin text among the rarities of specialist publications, a print or online, which preserve the critical editions. Help make this treasure knowable and available becomes therefore necessary to save a part of our modern conscience and to bring out the sunken island on the tip of the which we have built our tourist paradises and our cultural and cinematographic exoticisms. Medieval Latin literature has so far received little attention to this goal precisely because the medieval text has been so far object of predominantly academic interest, and therefore presented at best in a philological or interpretative capacity. But the degree of disconnect that has now occurred between specialist culture and widespread culture, between individual research and institutional relationships training with the local and social context now requires a new effort connection, excavation and reconstruction. This work will help to approach it and revocer a lost but living heritage.

Perspectives