Syriac Accounts Investigated through Novel Tools of Stemmatology: the reception of Byzantine hagiography within the Syriac Orthodox tradition

Objective

SAINTS investigates the reception of Byzantine hagiography within the Syriac Orthodox tradition, focusing on the strategies employed by translators and scribes to adapt the original accounts to the needs of specific religious communities. The project, firmly rooted in the field of textual philology, addresses the scientific challenge posed by the textual instability of hagiographical literature through an innovative approach of digital stemmatology. Developing a platform that enables interaction between Digital Scholarly Editions (DSE) and stemmatological tools, the project aims to reconstruct the original form of the Syriac translations and the history of their textual development in the manuscripts. In the following phase, by comparing the Syriac versions with Greek originals, the project aims to to explain the factors that determined the cross-confessional circulation of three selected hagiographies. In addition to producing critical editions and English translations of unedited Syriac texts, the main objectives of the project include: 1) studying the Syriac versions under the profile of the cultural adaptations and translation technique; 2) implementing of a novel type of DSE, which leverages algorithms for stemmatological analyses; 3) analysing why certains lives of saints were copied into specific collections rather than in others. To achieve these goals, the research will be conducted across three institutions: the Department of Humanities of the UNIPE in Buenos Aires (Outgoing phase); the Institute of Computational Linguistics of the CNR in Pisa (Secondment); the SARAS Department of Sapienza University in Rome (Returning phase). SAINTS aspires to generate a relevant impact on the ecdotic practice of all literary traditions transmitted by manuscripts, providing new tools in the field of textual criticism.