Publications
The Limits of Exactitude in Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Literature and Textual Transmission
Berlin-Boston 2022
N. Bruno , G. Dovico , O. Montepaone, M. Pelucchi
Building on Calvino’s observations on Exactitude in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, the present book elucidates on the possible definitions of exactitude, the endeavor of reaching exactitude, and the undeniable limits to the achievement of this ambitious milestone.
The eighteen essays in this interdisciplinary volume show how ancient and medieval authors have been dealing with the problem of exactitude vs. inexactitude and have been able to exploit the ambiguities related to these two concepts to various ends. The articles focus on rhetoric and historiography (section I), exact sciences and technical disciplines (II), the peculiarity of quotations (III), cases of programmatic inexactitude (IV) and textual transmission (V). Several interconnected questions weave a net across the volume: to what extent is exactitude the goal in ancient and medieval texts? How can the concepts of accuracy and inaccuracy aid the reinterpretation of an already known text or fact? To what extent can certain definitions of exactitude be stretched, without turning into inexactitude?
The volume presents an extensive study capable of highlighting the shrewdness and aptness of the concepts introduced by Calvino more than thirty years ago.
​
More information HERE: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110796612/html
Fragmented Memory. Omission, Selection and Loss in Ancient and Medieval Literature and History
Berlin-Boston 2022
N. Bruno, M. Filosa, Giulia Marinelli
Chance, in addition to the unavoidable ambiguity caused by time, is one of the main guilty parties in the transmission of ancient texts – or lack thereof. However, the same cannot be said for what concerns the mechanisms of selection and loss of historical and literary memory, where the voluntary awareness of obscuring is often part of a precise aim, thus leading the cultural memory of a literate society to become fragmented. The present volume explores the devices and criteria of selection and loss in Ancient and Medieval texts and the subsequent fragmentation of such literature, but it also addresses the questions of the damnatio memoriae, of literary strategies such as reticence and omission, as well as of known texts deemed lost but re-found thanks to state-of-the-art methods in digitization. The many and diverse nuances of the concepts of omission, selection, and loss throughout Ancient and Medieval literature and history are illustrated through a number of case studies in the four sections of this volume, each examining a different facet of the topic: ‘Mechanisms and criteria of textual loss and selection’, ‘Lost texts re-discovered’, ‘Voluntary omissions and desire for oblivion’, and ‘Re-working the known’.
​
More info HERE: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110742046/html
Defining Authorship, Debating Authenticity, Problems of Authority from Classical Antiquity to the Renaissance
Berlin-Boston 2020
R. Berardi, M. Filosa, D. Massimo
This volume explores the themes of authorship and authenticity – and connected issues – from the Classical Antiquity to the Renaissance. Its reflection is constructed within a threefold framework. A first section includes topics dealing with dubious or uncertain attribution of ancient works, homonymous writers, and problems regarding the reliability of compilation literature. The middle section goes through several issues concerning authorship: the balance between the author’s contribution to their own work and the role of collaborators, pupils, circles, reviewers, scribes, and even older sources, but also the influence of different compositional stages on the concept of ‘author’, and the challenges presented by anonymous texts. Finally, a third crucial section on authenticity and forgeries concludes the book: it contains contributions dealing with spurious works – or sections of works – , mechanisms of interpolation, misattribution, and deliberate forgery. The aim of the book is therefore to exemplify the many nuances of the complex problems of authenticity and authorship of ancient texts.
​
More info HERE: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110684629/html
On the Track of the Books. Scribes, Libraries and Textual Transmission
Berlin-Boston, 2019
R. Berardi, N. Bruno, L. Fizzarotti
This book offers the hint for a new reflection on ancient textual transmission and editorial practices in Antiquity.In the first section, it retraces the first steps of the process of ancient writing and editing. The reader will discover how the book is both a material object and a metaphorical personification, material or immaterial. The second section will focus on corpora of Greek texts, their formation, and their paratextual apparatus. Readers will explore various issues dealing with the mechanisms that are at the basis of the assembling of ancient Greek texts, but great attention will also be given to the role of ancient scholarly work. The third section shows how texts have two levels of authorship: the author of the text, and the scribe who copies the text. The scribe is not a medium, but plays a crucial role in changing the text. This section will focus on the protagonists of some interesting cases of textual transmission, but also on the books they manufactured or kept in the libraries, and on the words they engraved on stones. Therefore, the fresh voices of the contributors of this book, offer new perspectives on established research fields dealing with textual criticism.
More info HERE and here: https://www.degruyter.com/view/product/510814
Futuro Classico - 5 - The Old Lie, Classics and the Great War
2019
R. Berardi, N. Bruno, A. Busetto, L. Fizzarotti
Collection of selected papers from the workshop "Classics and the Great War"
More information HERE: https://ojs.cimedoc.uniba.it/index.php/fc/issue/view/110