Global Latin. Testi latini d’America e d’Asia fra Medioevo e prima età moderna. «Exploratory Workshop» (Siena, 31 gennaio - 1 febbraio 2019)

This is a first exploratory meeting about the Latin texts concerning East Asia in late Middle Ages and early Modern, a subject which is becoming a research line of our Center for Comparative Studies, now on the way to become an Interuniversity Research Center in cooperation with the orientalists of the Università per Stranieri di Siena. Center for Comparative Studies (www.centroideugsu.unisi.it), which is entitled to his founder, the medievalist and Koreanist I Deug-Su, born in Pusan 1938 and dead in Florence 2004: on his initiative the research team has digitized and transcribed about 5000 pages of the Latin and French version of the Acts of the Korean Martyrs of XIX century (Hagiographica Coreana, Pacini Editore), that we are editing volume by volume in cooperation with the National University of Seoul, whose specialists care for the newly discovered Korean original, thus making available accounts of the persecutions whit a significant historical, anthropological, religious and – what is not the least of our interests – narrative value. On his footsteps, highligthing the huge role of Latin in preserving documents and works of the Asian history, we are now encoding and collecting the Latin texts concerning East Asia in late Middle Ages and early Modern, written by merchants, explorators, missionaries, teachers, most of all Franciscan and Jesuits: a heritage consisting in thousands of texts on which we experiment new methods of automatized linguistic analysis. The research focus wants to be the Latin language as a tool able to illuminate cultural transfer. For better exploring it, we started to digitize and process a consistent bunch of such texts in the Eurasian Latin Archive, which dr. Carbé will present in this volume. This workshop, which aims at presenting a status of the researches about the Latin works written in East Asia and the historical relationship between East Asian culture and classical and medieval European culture, is a very little event but a great starting point of a long-term project, which for us is connected with both with the Asian Collection of ALIM (the Archive of the Italian Medieval Latinity) and the series Roma Sinica promoted by the Universities of Torino and Seoul, and will hopefully contribute to build new bridges between distant civilizations.