DAPIL – Digital archive of pilgrimage literature. Un archivio digitale per la letteratura medioevale di pellegrinaggio
Working Paper CNR-Ircres 4/2024
DAPIL – Digital archive of pilgrimage literature. Un archivio digitale per la letteratura medioevale di pellegrinaggio
DAPiL – Digital Archive of Pilgrimage Literature. A digital archive for medieval pilgrimage literature
Giuseppe Cuscunà[1]
Dipartimento di Scienze Umanistiche (DISUM) Piazza Dante Alighieri 24, 95124, Catania (CT)
corresponding author: giuseppe.cuscuna@phd.unict.it
Abstract
This working paper explores medieval pilgrimage literature, a corpus of literary documents based on pilgrims’ travel accounts. Although academic research has so far mainly focused on a historical approach, this study proposes a multidisciplinary methodology that combines philological, digital, and literary analysis to examine the nature and evolution of this literary genre. The adopted methodology is structured in several phases: first, the collection and selection of sources, compiling a corpus of 63 representative texts from the 4th to the 14th centuries. Second, the philological analysis is conducted, offering a detailed study of manuscript traditions, with particular attention to the genealogies of the codices for philological reconstruction. This process includes the re-examination of the stemmata codicum in light of the latest scientific research to identify the distinctive characteristics of the texts and trace the mutual influences among the works, leading to a literary analysis: the analysis focuses on the themes, motifs, and narrative techniques used by the authors to describe the pilgrimage experiences. This phase is crucial for examining the intertextuality and intergenericity within the corpus. However, the heart of this research lies in the creation of a digital archive: an innovative element of the methodology is the high-quality digitization of the main works of the corpus, in collaboration with the Byterfly project of CNR-IRCRES in Turin. This relational database facilitates access to the texts, enabling advanced searches and large-scale analysis in a short time. The proposed integrated approach allows for exploring new perspectives and expanding the understanding of medieval pilgrimage literature, with the aim of constructing a comprehensive and detailed picture of the genre and its transformations over time.
Keywords: digital archives, pilgrimage literature, digital humanities, medieval literature, romance philology.
DOI: 10.23760/2421-7158.2024.004
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How to Cite
Cuscunà, G. (2024). DAPIL – Digital archive of pilgrimage literature. Un archivio digitale per la letteratura medievale di pellegrinaggio (CNR-IRCrES Working Paper 4/2024). Istituto di Ricerca sulla Crescita Economica Sostenibile. http://dx.doi.org/10.23760/2421-7158.2024.004
[1] Questo working paper prende forma nell’ambito della collaborazione del CNR-IRCrES con l’Università degli Studi di Catania (Dottorato in Scienze dell’Interpretazione del Dipartimento di Scienze Umanistiche) per la creazione di un archivio digitale dal titolo Digital archive of pilgrimage literature – DAPIL, consultabile tramite un database relazionale sviluppato su Piattaforma Byterfly.