The “Musisque Deoque. A digital archive of Latin poetry, from its origins to the Italian Renaissance” Research Project, was established at the end of 2005. It aims to create a singular Latin poetry’s database, supplemented and updated with critical apparatus and exegetical equipments.

Objective of the traditional critical edition (or “Lachmannian” according to the classical philological terminology) is to revisit the archetype with the recensio, and then eventually improve it with emendatio, until the reconstruction closest to the lost original is reached. For centuries, printed book has been the publication form, containing rigid, immutable texts that are definitively determined by editors. This tiring and precious work has since offered, and still does, great incisive results in philological studies. However its limitation lies in the fact that a tradition that is intrinsically dynamic has been immobilized.

With the arrival of computer science technology, main collections of classical have been transferred onto digital device and existing resources (offline and online), thus allows quicker lexical searches. Yet even today’s search engine inquiry to a literary font database is limited to only providing results of a key inside a fix, “authoritarian”, text.

The intention of Musisque Deoque is to overcome these limitations, permitting to locate not only the chosen forms quoted from the reference edition, but also the variants proposed in the critical apparatus. From that, further knowledge on the accomplished itinerary — from ancient operas during the subsequent ages until the humanism and the renaissance — could emerge.

Musisque Deoque site, continuously updated with new critical apparatus, is intended as a reference window, but above all as an inter-textual search tool of the whole Latin versification heritage until the XVI century and more.

Musisque Deoque program has hitherto been actualized with the funds of the Ministero dell’Università e della Ricerca Scientifica e Tecnologica, in the sphere of the research projects announcement relevant to the national good PRIN 2005 and PRIN 2007 (in progress). The involved research units are as follows (respective persons-in-charge are shown between brackets):

Moreover, groups of researchers take part in the project at the Università di Catania (Rosa Maria d’Angelo), di Foggia (Giovanni Cipriani), di Lecce (Giovanni Laudizi), di Milano Statale (Massimo Gioseffi), di Salerno (Enrico Ariemma), di Urbino (Sandro Boldrini), di Verona (Alberto Cavarzere).