The Physiologus in the Digital Laboratory: The Earliest Stage of a Multilingual Tradition

• Applicant: Dr. Caroline Mace
• Subject Area: Greek and Latin Philology ; Medieval History
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 548606119

The Physiologus, originally written in Greek before the end of the third century, is one of the oldest texts offering a Christian interpretation of creation, and uses animal behaviour (often imaginary) as a model for human behaviour. This anonymous work was probably written in Egypt and became widely disseminated. Before the end of the first millennium, the Physiologus was translated twice each into Latin, Syriac and Arabic, once into Armenian (and from there Georgian) and once into Ethiopian, and there are also traces of the text in Coptic. In the second millennium, it was translated several times into various Slavic languages and from Latin into Icelandic, Old English and Old High German, and finally adapted into almost all vernacular languages of Western Europe by the time of the Renaissance. As Richard Gottheil (1899) emphasised, Physiologus is one of the "world-books" whose influence on medieval and modern imagination, culture and art is immeasurable. In order to grasp this spectacular development and evaluate it historically, it is initially necessary to gain a precise knowledge of the work in ist early stages. Although the Greek text was already edited in 1936 by Francesco Sbordone in three recensions based on an almost complete heuristic of the manuscripts, the history of ist transmission, especially in ist beginnings, is still unclear today. The original text form particularly remained unclear, thus, Sbordone’s stemmatic reconstruction of the relationships between the Greek manuscripts is demonstrably erroneous and his edition, which is based on this reconstruction, is problematic. Preparatory studies have demonstrated the importance of the Latin, Armenian-Georgian and Syriac versions for the reconstruction of the oldest Greek textual form, for which only one Greek manuscript can be considered a direct witness. However, the editions in which this manuscript and the non-Greek versions were made available do not meet the necessary text-critical standards. Therefore, a re-examination of all witnesses is necessary to establish the original Greek text and clarify the history of the multi-branched tradition. In addition, the comparative study of the oldest tradition of the Physiologus will also lead to new insights into the milieus in which the text was written or translated. The complexity of the relationships between the original Greek text and ist translations makes it necessary to use the most up-to-date methods and tools in the field of digital humanities to recover the oldest form of the Physiologus. This requires the development of a methodology specific to a historical-critical approach to multilingual textual traditions.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: France
• Partner Organisation: Agence Nationale de la Recherche / The French National Research Agency
• Cooperation Partner: Dr. Emmanuelle Kuhry