Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici

Descrizione del progetto

The project concerns the digitization of the principal work of Benjamin Kennicott (KN), the Vetus Testamentum Hebraicum cum variis lectionibus (Oxford 1776, 1778). The work is a collation or editio variorum in two volumes, containing the variants to the text of the
Hebrew Bible (HB) from both medieval manuscripts (MSS) and printed editions. To date, it constitutes the most extensive and comprehensive collection of variants of the HB in existence, as well as our main source of data on the transmission of the biblical
text in the Middle Ages.
The objectives of the project are three: (1) the production of a digital edition of the work, encoded according to the international standards of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI); (2) the collation and digitization of a certain number of unpublished MSS; (3) the creation of a linguistically annotated corpus of variants. The edition will allow for the easy navigation, for each biblical book, of both the Hebrew text and the critical apparatus of the variants. The MSS included in the edition will, when possible, be identified and accompanied by the necessary metadata. The TEI encoding of the apparatus will allow one to perform targeted philological analyses using computational tools. Such research may be relevant for the history and textual criticism of the biblical text, as well as for related disciplines such as codicology and paleography.
The creation of a corpus of variants aims to make available to scholars new linguistic data essential to the advancement of knowledge in the fields of the grammar and history of the Hebrew language. Linguistic annotation will allow information to be extracted by means of complex queries, based not only on keywords, but also on specific linguistic characteristics, impossible to detect with the digital resources currently available.
Finally, the collation of new MSS, chosen on the basis of criteria such as antiquity or relevance from a historical or text-critical point of view, has as its purpose the updating of the data collected by KN. The images of some of these MSS will be acquired and included in the digital edition. In this way it will be possible to view the variants both in the apparatus and in loco in the manuscript. New variants, absent in the original work, will also be linguistically annotated and included in the corpus. This update intends not only to enrich the original work, by including textual witnesses not known at the time of compilation, but also to lay the  oundation for a modern collation of medieval HB documentation, which still today awaits realization.

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