An ERC Consolidator Grant to the University of Padua with almost 2 million euros for the SIQILLYA Project
01.02.2023
The Executive Agency of the European Research Council announced the winners of its 2022 call and named the University of Padua Department of Linguistic and Literary Studies researcher Nicola Carpentieri as one of its recipients. Within the domain of Social Sciences and Humanities, Carpentieri SIQILLYA Project was rated excellent by the ERC Commission and funded with 1,931,221 euros over the next 5 years.
The result attests to the leading role that researchers at our University play in the context of highly competitive international calls. Within the first two years of the Horizon Europe framework program, the University of Padua has won 10 grants distributed across all 5 funding schemes: 5 Starting Grants, 3 Advanced Grants, 1 Synergy Grant, and 1 Proof of Concept. Consolidator Grants aim at supporting scientists who work in any field of knowledge and who are in a phase of consolidation of their career and their research team.
This milestone highlights the University’s commitment to strengthening programs for researchers presenting work as ERC project proposals and funding programs aimed at promoting the scientific development of young scientists of excellence that strengthen the independent trajectory of their careers.
As a research fellow at the Department of Linguistic and Literary Studies, Carpentieri’s SIQILLYA Project aims to redesign the literary history of the European Middle Ages, through a joint study of Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Latin and Italian poetry written in Sicily between the 10th and 13th century. The thesis explores Sicilia sveva, within which Italian opera was born, made use of socio-cultural practices borrowed from the Islamic world and influenced by multiple traditions: Jewish, Greek and Latin. These sociocultural practices, in turn, strongly influenced the birth of Italian poetry.
This central idea sees the 'origins' of Italian literature as an inadequate explanation of the cultural complexity of medieval Sicily. According to the classic thesis of Origini, the poets of the so-called Sicilian School first began to write verses in Italian, essentially emulating the Occitan troubadours in their poetry. Nicola Carpentieri, an expert in Arab language and culture, says he held doubts about this narrative. In Sicily, Arab poetry flourished for centuries until Sicilian poets began to write in Italian. Furthermore, other important poetic traditions flourished in Sicily at the same time, including Hebrew, Greek and Latin.
It is plausible that traditional languages, namely the Arab, Hebrew, Greek-Byzantine, Norman-Latin, and Romance benefited from each other in Sicily, but the crux of the matter is that to date, no one has explored this possibility.
Some scholars have studied Sicilian Arab poetry, others Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Italian, but no one has examined them together. The SIQILLIYA project intends to do just that, with particular attention to the social dimension of poetic production: who wrote verses, for whom, and with what objectives.
