DigiFlor · Digital Edition of the Roman de Florimont

Digital Edition of the Roman de Florimont

The project aimed to produce a digital scholarly edition of an overlooked Medieval text: the Roman de Florimont (1188). Almost unique among the contemporary romans, it offers a Mediterranean setting: its hero moves between Greece, Southern Italy, Albania, etc. and its author declares to have translated it from a Greek original. Furthermore, this thematic interest intersects with a remarkable linguistic relevance as the tradition includes witnesses related to two understudied linguistic domains: Franco-Provençal (the third French language, together with the Langue d'Oil and the Langue d'Oc) and Franco-Italian (an artificial literary language). Franco-Provençal counts much documentary evidence but very few literary witnesses; therefore, the recovery of a poetic text within this domain constitutes a very important contribution to the field. The focus on the Franco-Italian manuscripts can be understood in the context of the growing interest for the Medieval European and extra-European diffusion of French as a literary language. Despite this interest, Florimont has been almost entirely neglected by the scholarly community: the only existing edition (Hilka’s in 1932) is seriously flawed. The main objective of the project was the creation of a “complex” digital edition aiming to offer “something more” than a printed edition. First of all, to the display level; the editorial model was a diplomatic edition (i.e. an edition faithful to the manuscript) offering all those details that are usually waived, especially due to the physical limits and to the costs imposed by the paper book format, above all in presence of several manuscripts; digital technology allows to overcome this obstacle, with the further advantage of considerably shortening publication times. But also at the level of “analysis potential”: the second advantage of a digital edition is in fact the possibility to manipulate the text, carry out research, extract statistical data and add hypertextual links. The project therefore represented a moment of critical reflection around the digital editorial practices concerning above all the manuscript texts; and it ended with a series of alternative proposals having the ambition to solicit discussion. Secondly, the project has made available to the academic community some prototype tools that want to represent a stimulus to discuss some current practices: The main objectives of the project were the production of the Roman de Florimont edition (four manuscripts) and the study and test of digital philological tools applied to Medieval vernacular texts.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union