Musisque Deoque

A digital archive
of Latin poetry

The Research Project Musisque Deoque. A digital archive of Latin poetry, from its origins to the Italian Renaissance was established at the end of 2005 with the main goal of creating a singular database of Latin poetry, supported by a critical and exegetical electronic apparatus.

At present, main collections of classical texts have been transferred onto digital device while resources, mostly online, allow quicker lexical searches. In most cases, however, search engine inquiry only provides results of a key inside a fix and ‘authoritarian’ text. The aim of Musisque Deoque is to overcome these limitations, allowing to locate not only the forms chosen from the text of a reference edition, but also the variants in its critical apparatus.

Lately, the website has been implemented with new functions. These are the most important: epigraphica: peculiar handling of the Carmina Latina Epigraphica, with a search by corpora, by incipit, other information about place of origin, dating, when existing a ‘praescriptum’ and ‘postscriptum’ in prose, etc.; in addition, a photographic archive of the inscriptions on catalogue has been set up; witnesses: the site has been supplied, in the apparatus, with a standard nomenclature of the manuscripts, displaying the current proper names of city, library, collection and the signature; a list of poets and works that are present in the same manuscript; a link to the library’s website and, if existing, to the digitised images of the codex; search by lemmas: available in the advanced search; metrical scan of all the works in dactylic verses, performed by the Pedecerto application; co-occurrences: starting from a chosen source text, the whole corpus is investigated to find verbal or non-verbal rhythmic similarities, Hellenica: a digital archive of Greek poetry.

Musisque Deoque has hitherto been supported by the funds of the Ministero dell’Università e della Ricerca Scientifica e Tecnologica in the frame of PRIN 2005 and 2007.