The Project in a few words
The BAT database is an invaluable tool for studying the diffusion of ideas on Greco-Roman Antiquity in 18th and 19th century Europe. No library currently has a complete collection of translations of classical scholarship published between the Glorious Revolution and the Belle Epoque into the various European languages. No single library has anything close to a complete collection of translated works of modern classical scholarship in different European languages (for example, the German and French translations of Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire). Our collection of data begins in the early 18thcentury, the time which saw the retreat of Latin as the lingua franca of the Republic of Letters, and, conversely, the increasing use of vernaculars which rendered translation the principal means of circulation of classical knowledge in Europe.
In The World as Will and as Representation (1819), Arthur Schopenhauer wrote : “Latin has ceased to be the language of all scientific investigation has the disadvantage that there is no longer an immediately common scientific literature for the whole of Europe, but only national literatures. In this way every scholar is primarily limited to a much smaller public, and moreover to a public steeped in national narrow views and prejudices. Then he must now learn the four principal European languages together with the two ancient languages”.
If in the 19th century the national particularism replaces the universalism of the age of the Republic of Letters, the transmission of knowledge cannot nonetheless be conceived independently of the transfer and the exchange between the national cultures. Thus, Antiquity is called to participate in sort of cosmopolitan exchange, which paradoxically puts the different interpretations of Greece and Rome into contact on the basis of linguistic specificity and national traditions.
This is why it is crucial to study classical reception through a transnational and interdisciplinary perspective that privileges the cultural dynamics of transfer and translation.
Objectives 2022-2027
Within the framework of the partnership with the EfA, extended by further networking with the Villa Medicis and the Casa Velasquez we would like to :
(1) Expand the database so that it becomes a full-blown digital encyclopaedia that will be at once a unique research resource for scholars, but also easy to use for a non-specialist user.
The achievement of this objective implies:
a. Extending the content of the database to all European languages, starting with Italian and Spanish. This work will be based, in the first place, on the original books included in the existing data collection. The full-scale development of the database with the incorporation data on a pan-European level will enable the robust reconstruction of the networks of diffusion of classical knowledge in the 18th and 19th centuries.
b. Cleaning and restructuring the contents of the database in order to incorporate interactive visualizations in accordance with current approaches in the Digital Humanities.
(2) Developing the classical reception studies field with an interdisciplinary and transnational team and promoting individual and collective research and publications
Disciplinary fields : history of ideas, historiography, classical reception studies, cultural transfer studies, history of classical scholarship, translation studies, history of editions, digital humanities
Background
It was in a tiny office under the roof of the Classics Centre in Oxford that the project was originally launched, by Oswyn Murray and Chryssanthi Avlami. The initials of the project (and the proximity of the attic, no doubt) led us to look for its logo in George Cuvier's The Animal Kingdom Distributed According to its Organization (1817) and to select from a large number of bat species the one that owed its name to both Greek and Latin, the glossophaga ecaudala.
The team quickly expanded, thanks to the participation of Suzanne Stark, which allowed us to focus initially on the dissemination of classical knowledge between France, England and Germany. The project was transferred to the ANHIMA research centre, its current home. At the same time, the first study days organised around the project led to two international conferences, held in Rome and Madrid respectively, with the collaboration with Thomas Spaëth, Barbara von Reibniz and Stephan Rebenich on the one hand, and Mirella Romero and Jaime Alvar on the other (see the Publications section).
The partnership with the French School of Athens (2018-2021) and funding from the Onassis Foundation allowed us to put the database, initially designed by Dr Sarah Cohen, online and to recruit Nikos Kokkomelis who added, with the assistance of Kondylenia Belitsou, the entries in modern Greek. An internship granted by the ANHIMA Centre to Dimitra Mastoraki helped us to verify the existing titles. This stage of the project has been completed by the organisation of the conference Multiple Antiquities of Greek Modernity. A bilingual volume, in French and English, is currently being published by the EfA editions.