Summer School: Classical Bilingualism—From Greco-Roman Antiquity to Early Modern Europe

Having multilingualism as the overarching theme, the rich program of the summer school has four main avenues: 1) Manifestations of Latin-Greek Bilingualism Throughout History; 2) Code-switching as a Model of Bilingual Interaction; 3) Greek-to-Latin Translations from Antiquity to the Renaissance; 4) Digital Tools for Researching Classical Bilingualism.

The first block of lectures, Manifestations of Latin-Greek Bilingualism Throughout History, approaches the phenomenon of multilingualism from a diachronic perspective. Alessandro Bonvini will inaugurate the program by focusing on the Renaissance afterlives of Aulus Gellius’s Noctes Atticae both as a source for and a model of the classical bilingual humanist. Secondly, HellBel team members Liese Dictus and Dries Nijs will explore the performative aspects of the so-called New Ancient Greek literature, showing its visual appeal to early modern scholars. Then, Andrea Cuomo will share his ongoing research into the manifold uses of the Latin language in late Byzantium. Finally, two lectures by Filippomaria Pontani will explore the relationship between classical bilingualism and early modern Christianity, focusing on humanist Greek prayers, as well as religious compositions from Counter-Reformation Rome.

The second block of lectures, Code-switching as a Model of Bilingual Interaction, approaches code-switching as a distinct shape of multilingual behaviour. In the opening lecture, Raf Van Rooy will introduce the theory of the linguistic model of code-switching, arguing that this model is applicable – with some caveats – not only to oral, but also to written utterances. Then, Maria Napoli will provide an overview of Latin-Greek interactions in Late Latin literature, focusing on syntactic aspects of bilingualism. Finally, Mariia Timoshchuk will present an overview of the diverse metaphors employed to describe code-switching, ranging from antiquity to Renaissance sources.

The third block of lectures is titled Greek-to-Latin Translations from Antiquity to the Renaissance. First, Filippomaria Pontani will explore early humanist translations of Homer, namely the ones by Leonzio Pilato and Petrarch. Anna Chahoud will then delve into early modern Greek-to-Latin translations, exploring Josephus Justus Scaliger’s translation of Sophocles’ Ajax in comparison with ancient attempts to render Sophocles’ play, notably by Cicero. To conclude, Pieter Beullens will offer an overview of Aristotle’s (late) medieval translators, showing how these scholars managed to render one of Greece’s foremost thinkers for a Latin audience.

The fourth thematic block invites participants to learn more about the digital tools for the study of historical multilingualism. Two workshops are offered, one on relational databases and another one on the Optic Text Recognition (OCR) tool Transkribus, both employed to build the first open access, machine-readable corpus of Erasmus of Rotterdam’s oeuvre. Finally, Flavio Massimilano Cecchini will discuss the challenges of developing and implementing a formalism based on the standard of Universal Dependencies. This systematic approach makes the comparison between different languages possible and fruitful for any kind of research, even beyond the field of Latin-Greek bilingualism.

Finally, two slots are devoted to the ERASMOS team members’ (Isabelle Maes, Manou Vermeire) work-in-progress, investigating Latin-Greek code-switching in Erasmus’ correspondence and in the Neo-Latin epigram.

Find more information here.