UnderText - Understanding the Textual Development and the Literary Fortune of the Book of Jubilees through Ages, Languages and across Geographic Regions

ID Call: HORIZON-MSCA-2023-PF-01 MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships

Sapienza's role in the project: Host Institution

Supervisor: Alessandro Bausi

Fellow: Daniele Minisini

Department: History, Anthropology, Religion, Arts and Performing Arts 

Project start date: September 1, 2024

Project end date: August 31, 2027

Abstract:

Carefully transmitted by some and deliberately erased by others, at times remembered through the centuries, at others completely forgotten and vanished into the unseen, the Book of Jubilees is a second-century BCE apocryphal Jewish text that retells the legendary foundational stories of the Books of Genesis and Exodus with the addition of otherwise unknown details. “UnderText: UNDERstanding the TEXTual development and the literary fortune of the Book of Jubilees through ages, languages and across geographic regions” will shed new light on the development and fortune of such an important text focusing on the relationship between the Hebrew original text (whose fragments have been discovered at Qumran), a Latin translation preserved in the undertext of a fifth-century palimpsest stored at the Ambrosian Library in Milan and the Geʿez (the classical language of Ethiopia and Eritrea) translation of the Book of Jubilees.
By comparing different translations into multiple languages, the fortunes of the Book of Jubilees in Europe and its transmission across different geographic regions will be interwoven throughout the course of the research, and UnderText will shed light on how divergent religious and cultural contexts have reflected variously on common texts and themes. Through meticulous analysis and cross-linguistic comparisons, the project promises to shed new light on the book’s textual evolution and cultural impact, reviving a lost chapter of European literary heritage. The findings will enrich academic discourse and prompt reflection on contemporary issues like cancel culture and the Jewish-European narrative. The project will be conducted in partnership with Universität Zürich and Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano and will benefit from the collaboration and seminal results of the Jubilees Palimpsest Project (P.I. Prof. Todd Hanneken), which is preparing a critical edition, translation, and history of the manuscript of Latin Jubilees.