Geography and History of the Literature in Medieval Veneto. Prospects and Methods of the AtLiVe Project

This paper aims to describe the methods and the results of the Atlas of the Literature of Medieval Veneto, a project hosted at the University of Padua (Italy). This project proposes a digital literary archive, an original and innovative open-access instrument using Romance literary and historical documentation, to aid the study of the history and the geography of medieval Venetian culture. The complexity of the cultural dynamics of a territory which was defined as a crossroad of the European culture requires nowadays, a period susceptible to interconnections and networking, new research tools. What was happening within specific periods or geographical areas, in the range of what we currently classify as Venetian? The digital architecture of this project consists of a reticular structure of single and detailed data sheets, concerning the medieval Romance literary domain. This structure will be able to host contents of several complementary disciplines, in order to link together a wide range of research fields. In this way, it is possible to contribute to an epistemological redefinition of the concept of territory, based on updated and concrete data in relation to each other.