“Greek Studies in 15th Century Europe” is a Marie Curie individual research project held by Dr. Paola Tomè and financed by the European Union at the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages in Oxford. A new website of the project has been launched, featuring the most important research topics and information about ongoing events, activities, resources and people involved.
Over the past 30 years it has become evident to scholars that humanism, through the re-appreciation of classical antiquity, created a bridge to the modern era, which also includes the Middle Ages. The criticism of the humanists against Medieval authors did not prevent them from using some tools that the Middle Ages had developed or synthesized: glossaries, epitomes, dictionaries, encyclopaedias, translations, commentaries. At present one thing that is missing, however, is a systematic investigation of the tools used for the study of Greek between the fifteenth and sixteenth century; this is truly important, because, in the following centuries, Greek culture provided the basis of European thought in all the most important fields of knowledge.
Researchers
Marie Curie Fellow
Paola Tomè’s research interests focused on fifteenth-century scholarly works and culture. She has worked on Giovanni Tortelli (1400 c.ca – 1466), the first librarian of the rising Vatican Library, on the translations from Greek into Latin printed in the Veneto region in the fifteenth century, and has also dealt with the grammatical traditions from Antiquity to the Renaissance.
