Digital philology of the Italian Middle Ages

Abstract

Although its main lines of enquiry and its approaches to textual culture are not always shared by the international mainstream of philological studies, Italian textual criticism is known for its methodological strength and the quality of its output. Publishing reliable critical texts based on exhaustive or extensive knowledge of the textual transmission implies the adoption of a diachronic approach to the textual tradition, the reconstruction of the genealogy of the copies, and a thorough examination of each witness. This article aims to show how digital philology can meet the needs of the Italian philological tradition, starting from the potential development of the Corpus OVI (currently the largest corpus available online for texts of a medieval Romance language), and drawing the scenario of a possible philological research infrastructure.