MARE: Manuscripts and books from Asia Reaching Europe. A semantically enhanced digital library mapping Asian books circulation along the Silk Maritime Routes

English version

Moving from the perspective of the Histoire croisée (entangled history) and of the interconnections between different societies, the project will investigate a corpus of texts, manuscripts and books, in different classical and oriental languages (such as Chinese, Arab, Syriac), travelling from the East to Europe, showing the rich network of cultural relations between Europe and ‘Asia’ that have developed, in parallel with commercial relations, along the route of the Maritime Silk Routes – that have not been as thoroughly analyzed as the Land Routes, but are no less important. Through the texts selected as the most significant case studies within a vast temporal panorama (from 700 to 1700, from the Byzantine era to the 18th century), it will be possible to visually compare both the circulation of material objects and the evolution of the path constituted by the maritime connection routes between Europe and the Far East, as well as the different agencies involved in the cultural, historical, and diplomatic-commercial interaction. Considering “material things as entry points into history”, (Ulrich 2015), in order to share the digitization, translation, and contextualization of the rare or unpublished sources selected, the M.A.R.E. project will create a digital platform and a virtual mapping of the historical-geographical paths on which the objects move, making the continuous contact over time between Europe and Asia, understood in its broadest sense. The research project, divided into two years (one year focused on the analysis of materials and site design, one year on data loading and website readability), aims to carry out a digital visual rendering in line with the “Third” Mission objectives of the universities, to make books and testimonies, so far confined to a single research sector, accessible to a multiplicity and interdisciplinarity of scholarly approaches. These resources, often “hidden” due to linguistic difficulty or their location will now be disclosed and readable to a wider audience, both local and global.

The project, which will benefit from an interdisciplinary research team comprising historians and scholars of the various linguistic-literary traditions (Chinese; Arabic; Latin; Greek) and computer science, will allow to evaluate and interpret the data by combining research already started in the often separated academic sectors in a single, united, transversal and dynamic corpus, opening up to new perspectives of diachronic and comparative studies on Arabic and Chinese sources, as well as on the production of translations and, more generally, the circulation of texts that testify of the interaction between faiths, different social systems and cultural universes that moved along the Silk Maritime Routes.