Inventing Ancient Drama in scholarly paratexts of the XVIth c. Interpretation, translation and digital exploration – IThAC

IThAC aims at the study of the reception of Ancient Drama in XVIth c. Europe through the analysis of the scholarly printed paratexts of its editions, and at the diffusion of the French translation of this corpus thnaks to a dynamic website.
Our hypothesis is that the gathering, translation and analysis of this corpus, which has been neglected for a long time because it was hard to find and composed in Latin, if not in Greek, will enable researchers to grasp how Ancient Drama has been first received and understood by its « inventors ». It will also help investigate how the ideas and methods at work in thoses paratexts circulated and evolved, thanks to their large diffusion made possible by printing, in the very context of the invention of modern drama and modern philology. Those paratexts, which were most of the time written by major scholars of the time, have had a wide audience and circulated much more than those written in vernacular, because Latin was then the language by scholars to communicate : by neglecting them, one omits a major stage of the intellectual debates on drama, philology and the reception of Antiquity ; by taking them into account, IThAC will help reconstructing this debates.
Though there has been studies on the reception of some Ancient dramatists, and on some paratexts to their editions, this corpus has not yet been studied as a whole. IThAC, by gathering together philologists, historians of Drama, specialists of Greek, Latin and neo-Latin Drama, will study this important corpus by translating it and developing digital tools to explore it systematically. This will enable researchers to spot the major concepts used and build by the scholars and to visualise their chronology, the evolution of the nomber of editions by poet, genre, language, country ; to map places of print, nets of humanists and to highlight their collaborations.
Thanks to this interdisciplinary approach of the genesis, the transformation, the evolution and the circulation of the ideas on Ancien Drama in XVIth c. Europe, IThAC will allow a new insight on the Reception of Ancient Drama, the birth of Modern Drama and more broadly on scholarship in XVIth c. Europe. It will also give access to an unknown european heritage.