A critical edition of the scholia to Euripides’ Medea (working title)

This project intends to offer a new critical edition of the scholia to Euripides’ Medea, studying both the textual tradition of this corpus of scholia and the ancient exegesis of Euripides. The tragedy, first produced in 431 BC, has been an inspiration for literary and artistic works over the millennia; moreover, it has been the object of enduring scholarly interest since the first studies on tragedy by Aristotle and his pupils. The foundation of the library of Alexandria in the 3rd century BC marked the beginning of the Hellenistic scholarship whose studies on the tragic text resulted in commentaries and editions. Also in Roman Imperial age scholars worked on this text, preserving the work of their predecessors and adding new erudite material. After a long process of abridgement and rephrasing, these ancient exegetic materials, once mostly in the form of commentaries, now survive in the condensed form of marginal annotations in medieval manuscripts.
Stemming from this erudite activity, scholia provide historical, lexicographical, mythological information; they also provide essential details about the production of the tragedy and the sources employed by the poet, offering variant readings or different interpretations of the text. Furthermore, they give us a valuable insight into the world of ancient scholarship.
As far as the textual tradition is concerned, this study will provide an updated list of manuscripts that preserve the scholia to Medea, examining those manuscripts so far overlooked in greater depth. New codicological and palaeographical details might allow further considerations on the relationship between the codices, shedding light on the transmission of Euripidean tragedies. The text of scholia will be established, keeping in mind that the non-fixed nature of a scholiastic corpus led every copyist to rework the text of his antigraph by rephrasing, abbreviating or adding new material. Ancient grammatical and lexicographical works were employed as a source for these additions; moreover, both scholia and lexicographical collections originated from the same ancient commentaries. It is for these reasons that lexica and Etymologica will be taken into account in editing this corpus of scholia. Lastly, the contents will be analysed, taking into consideration all the information that scholia can provide on the tragedy itself and on the scholarly attention it has received over the centuries.

Short biography

Giulia Dovico studied Classics at the University of Padua (Italy), where she earned her BA (2013) and her MA (2015). As an Erasmus student, she spent the winter semester 2011-2012 at the University of Burgundy (Dijon, France). Her two final theses studied different aspects of the Aristophanic tradition: namely, the earliest stages of the tradition of Lysistrata and the transmission of the Aristophanes’ comedies in the form of excerpts. Her interest for the Ancient Greek Comedy, as a performative genre, led her to study in depth Greek metrics, attending the Summer School in Greek Metrics and Ritmics in Urbino (September 2015). She also improved her abilities in editing classical texts thanks to the Stage d'écdotique, arranged by the Sources Chrétiennes in Lyon (March 2016). Recently, she has attended the Summer School ManuScience ’17, which focused on the application of new technologies to the study of manuscripts. Since April 2017, she has been an a.r.t.e.s EUmanities fellow.

Contact: gdovico(at)uni-koeln.de

Publications

G. Dovico, Excerpta manoscritti della commedie di Aristofane: per una prima recensio, «FuturoClassico» 2 (2016), pp. 62–118.

_{Cover photo: Jean Le Tavernier: Portrait of Jean Miélot, from the manuscript Paris, BNF, fr. 9198, f. 19r. ( via https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AEscribano.jpg) // Portrait photo: Patric Fouad}

a.r.t.e.s. EUmanities has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 713600.

Details:
Call: H2020-MSCA-COFUND-2015 | Proposal: 713600 – artes EUmanities
CORDIS: http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/203182_de.html