Exploring texts of Latin poetry composed in Italy between 1250 and 1550
The research project Italian Poetry in Latin came into being in 1999 with the aim of identifying,
surveying, and digitising Latin poems, produced in Italian cultural circles, within the period between
Dante's birth and the first half of the 16th century. Over time, the archive has been enriched thanks to the contributions of dozens of scholars.
Today, Italian Poetry in Latin thus collects a great harvest of Latin poetic texts, anonymous or by famous authors,
often unpublished, difficult to find or completely neglected. These texts can be investigated thanks to a specialised search engine,
which in 2023 has expanded its potential, enabling an integrated and extended
investigation of the corpus of ancient Latin poetry in Musisque Deoque.
This new function thus opens up new possibilities in the study of the legacy of ancient poets
within the Latin versification of the Italian area between the 14th and 16th centuries.
In 2019, the MQDQ Galaxy project
was created: it aims to to develop the archives and associated functions, update users on the latest acquisitions, and to collect
proposals for collaboration.
The choice of the time segment under consideration places this archive within a broader project, which aims, starting with the
Musisque Deoque site
and passing through PoetriaNova. A CD-Rom of Latin Medieval Poetry, 650-1250 A. D. (Florence 2010, 20011),
to restore in electronic and "searchable" format the wide range of Latin versification from the archaic, classical,
late antique and medieval periods. Thus the field open to a rapid and secure intertextual search is being greatly extended,
spanning eighteen centuries of poetic production, from the remote origins of Rome’s literary language up to the Italian flourishing Humanism and Renaissance.