Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici

The history of the cultural contacts between the West and the Far East has been related both in Chinese among the "Official Dynastic Histories" and in Latin, but it was the latter, the very international language until 18th century, that produced cultural interferences and influences. With the Jesuit missions of the 16th to the 17th centuries, this exchange increased enormously in terms of quantity and thematic variety, involving the transmission (in Latin or in Chinese translation from Latin sources) of classical and medieval European texts. It thus generated a textual mass of over 7000 units, according to B. Elman and N. Golvers. Latin translations of Chinese texts and Latin texts concerning China had an extraordinary importance in the European thought of the 17th and 18th centuries as evidenced by philosophers such as Bayle, Leibniz, Wolff and Voltaire. The projects ELA (2018-2020) and SERICA (2021-2023) are working to make accessible to the scientific community a large part of these texts, but the building of digital library requires also an in-depth study on the mediation language. Therefore, the aim of Classica Serica, that joins Latinists and Sinologists who already worked in "ELA-Global Latin" prototype and SERICA project, is the linguistic study of Eastern Latin and the reception of classics -Latin and Chinese in the Latin and Latin-Chinese texts from the Medieval and the Early Modern Ages concerning East Asia or produced in East Asia. The researchers make use of advanced digital mining tools (such as ELA-tools: http://ela.unisi.it/?page_id=1007) both for textual and thematic analysis, which will engender cross-linguistic and cross-cultural studies on some exemplary topics. Such works will be recovered from old prints and manuscripts, also by exploring the ARSI Archive of the Jesuits (Vatican City), the former Lazarist (now Beitang) Library of Beijing and the collections of Greek and Latin works in the Shanghai Library and in Macao's Public Library. The biennial plan aims at improving ELA and SERICA databases with a large number of significant and exemplary texts, but – above all – to study them under a linguistic and cultural point of view. This project will contribute to research on Eurasian relationships by extracting and investigating literary, cultural and linguistic data, to be compared with the "European" Latin literature, in order to determine the specificity of East Asian Latin and enhance the relationships with classical Latin and with East Asian classics. Such contents will be the subject of two seminars in 2023 ("Latin language of Jesuits early modern Europeans in China, Korea and Japan", and "Science, Knowledge and Classics in early modern East Asia") and a final conference in 2024, whose results will be published in open access volumes in De Gruyter series “Roma Sinica” and text-editions representative of the main cultural areas, as well as research articles and e-book publications.