Ongoing projects

under construction

LAGOOS [ΛΑΓΩΟΣ] – A Life in Ancient Greek: The Secret Diary of Karl Benedikt Hase (1780–1864)

The ΛΑΓΩΟΣ project has at its core the secret diary of celebrated Hellenist Karl Benedikt Hase, which he kept in Ancient Greek. Hase was recognised as one of the foremost specialists of Greek in the French academia of his time, and later scholars applaud the value of his work as a lexicographer and editor of Greek texts. Hase has also, however, been identified as the perpetrator of a series of forgeries of Byzantine texts that have been a centre of discussion since the early 20th century. Historians of 19th-century Philhellenism have also highlighted Hase’s influence within the lively Greek networks of Paris on the eve of the Greek Revolution. Hase’s secret diary was known previously only from a series of short excerpts, but it has long been acknowledged as a document of extraordinary significance for both historical and philological research. This project will make the surviving text of the diary available to scholarship for the first time in a digital edition. Building on this philological groundwork, the project will undertake a series of analytical studies designed to advance our knowledge of Hase’s role in the history of Greek scholarship.

See: https://lagoos.org

GrECI – Greek Heritage in European Culture and Identity

The heritage of ancient Greece is commonly acclaimed as a ‘pillar’ of common European culture and identity. The complex historical processes of cultural reception and appropriation that shaped this notion are, however, still hardly understood, partly due to institutional fragmentation of the field of early modern Hellenism. The project ‘Greek Heritage in European Culture and Identity’ (GrECI) explores a key phase in this process: the reception and appropriation of ancient Greek culture in early modern Europe (15th-17th century), from the so-called ‘rediscovery’ of Greek language and literature to their full incorporation in the European cultural landscape. GrECI aims to examine this complex historical subject and its implications for present-day ideas of European identity within an interdisciplinary and international framework, through a consortium of three partners from Cyprus (University of Cyprus), Norway (University of Oslo), and France (University of Franche-Comté).

See: https://greci-twinning.org/

Code-switching in Neo-Latin literature during the early age of printing (ca. 1470–1550): Latin between Greek and the vernaculars in the multilingual Low Countries

The main aim of the project is to conduct a meticulous analysis of the literary position of Neo-Latin in the multilingual landscape of Renaissance Europe during the first century of commercialized printing, taking the Low Countries as its case study. In this area, Neo-Latin got increasing competition from other languages as vehicles of literature, thought, and supra-regional communication, especially the vernaculars and Greek. What is more, speakers and writers eagerly switched from Latin to these languages, and back again. This broad range of code-switching in humanist Neo-Latin has, however, never been studied in an encompassing fashion, and drawing up the literary landscape of the early modern Low Countries has been misguidedly focused on Latin–vernacular interactions. As such, this research project adopts new literary and sociolinguistic perspectives on humanist Neo-Latin, zooming in on Latin–Greek code-switching. The project aims to investigate the reasons (literary, intellectual, social, linguistic, …) why this widespread form of code-switching occurred in Neo-Latin literature.

See: https://www.kuleuven.be/onderzoek/portaal/#/projecten/3H220513?hl=en&lang=en

Helleno-Nordica: The Humanist Greek Heritage of the Swedish Empire

Interest in learning, reading, and writing ancient Greek was revived in Florence and other Italian cities during the Renaissance and spread across Europe aided by the new technology of printing. It spread to the Baltic Sea Region in the 16th century and assumed a specific role in the cultural and educational system. The rise of interest in ancient Greek culture and language was closely linked to the humanist movement and the Lutheran Reformation. Helleno-Nordica aims to examine this specifically northern European approach to the study and use of the ancient Greek past and its language in the early modern period, focusing mainly on Protestant areas: Great Sweden, its gymnasia and universities (Uppsala and its daughters).

See: https://projekt.ht.lu.se/helleno-nordica/

The reception of ancient Greece in pre-modern French literature and illustrations of manuscripts and printed books (1320-1550): how invented memories shaped the identity of European communities

The AGRELITA Project studies the reception of ancient Greece, exploring a corpus of French-language literary works produced from 1320 to the 1550s, as well as the images of their manuscripts and printed books. The development of direct translations from Greek to French begins only from the 1550s. From the beginning of the 14th Century until the middle of the 16th Century, French-language authors and artists who illustrate manuscripts and printed books of their works, with some exceptions, have no direct knowledge of Greek works. The knowledge about ancient Greece that they transmit and reinvent in their texts and in their illustrations is mediated by various filters. Their reception is indirect, based on previous textual and iconographic works, whose representations of ancient Greece are in fact the result of one or more receptions.

See: https://agrelita.hypotheses.org/a-propos