Eurasian Latin Archive

The “Eurasian Latin Archive” project was born for the creation of a digital library consisting of Latin texts and documents from medieval and early modern times concerning East Asia, including a specific “Latin Silk Road” section dedicated to Latin or Latin-Chinese texts.
The Eurasian Latin Archive will be provided with digital mining tools for textual and thematic analysis. Aim of the collection is the comparative language analysis, both internal with other latin texts from different eras and areas, and with non-latin texts with homogeneous subjects.
Materials will be available via a platform that includes tools for language and semantic analysis, which is in the design phase to date within the Das-MeMo project, started March 2018. The platform is inspired by the Alim project, whose “Asian Collection” is the starting point for the Eurasian Latin Archive.

The collection will be provided with digital mining tools for textual and thematic analysis, The first nucleus will consist of the texts of Italian missionaries and merchants in the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries; an extension will be created with the letters and documents written by Jesuits in the 16th and 17th centuries . This digital library/archive will build a new corpus of significant “ Eurasian ” texts hitherto less known or unpublished, which will contribute to research on Eurasian relationships by extracting and investigating 1) historical-cultural data about religions, laws, science, art, and customs ; 2) linguistic data, to be compared with the values of European Latin literature, both for determining the specificity of East Asiatic Latin and for investigating overlapping and mismatches between Latin words and their local (mostly Chinese) equivalents. Such content will be the subject of paper and e-book publications on the cultural history of East Asia and on Latin (and Chinese) historical linguistics.

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