Translating the Homeric Scholia in the manuscript Venetus A: from the text to hypertext
Georgia Kolovou (Center for Hellenic Studies)
Digital Classicist London seminar 2019
Friday July 12th at 16:30, in room G11, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU
Livecast at Digital Classicist London YouTube channel.
The scholia to Homer’s Iliad—marginal and interlinear annotations that accompany the text in medieval manuscripts—form a gigantic corpus of unparalleled richness. They preserve significant information on the Homeric text and on its ancient reception and commentary, inherited from the Alexandrians (3rd-2nd cent. BC) and their successors, and they constitute an encyclopedia of ancient knowledge on this most important of texts. The manuscript Marciana 822 (= Marcianus Graecus Z. 454), known to Homeric scholars as the Venetus A, is the oldest complete text of the Iliad in existence. It was acquired by the Greek Cardinal Basileus Bessarion in the 15th century CE and donated together with his entire collection of Greek manuscripts to the Republic of Venice, thereby forming the Marciana library’s initial collection. The Homer Multitext project offers a complete, web-based, digital scholarly edition of the contents of this deluxe manuscript, the oldest complete witness to the poem, together with its marginal comments (scholia). The text and scholia have been transcribed as a digital diplomatic edition, representing faithfully the text of the manuscript, and marked up with TEI-XML encoding for several key features. Our goal is to present, firstly, the Homer Multitext edition of the Venetus A manuscript and, secondly, to discuss about the philological and technical questions concerning the translation of the Homeric scholia in the structural and semantic mark-up of this digital edition.
ALL WELCOME