ALIM ieri e oggi

Abstract

ALIM (Archive of the Italian Latinity of the Middle Ages) aims to provide free online access to all the Latin texts produced in Italy during the Middle Ages. For several centuries, in fact, Latin represented the only language in which, in addition to historical documentation, many of the major creations of thought, science, and literature of the Middle Ages were expressed. Even when national languages imposed themselves in written form, Latin never lost its role and prestige as transnational language. Born in the Nineties, the original purpose for ALIM project is to integrate the linguistic information which, for the previous centuries, is made available in the Dictionary of Medieval Italian Latinity, promoted by the U.A.N. (National Academic Union) under the guidance of F. Arnaldi and P. Smiraglia (Latinitatis Italicae Medii Aevi lexicon, Florence 2001). In addition to providing critically reliable texts for the use of philologists, historians of literature, historians of institutions, culture, and science of the Middle Ages, the ALIM project aims to produce useful material for a dictionary of European Medieval Latin. The ultimate goal of the latter project is to collect and unify the lexicons produced by all the European states for their own medieval Latin texts.