About

The Homer Multitext project is a multi-institutional research project publishing the first digital edition of the text and scholia of the Venetus A, the earliest surviving manuscript of Homer’s Iliad. Gustavus undergraduates are working alongside teams across the US and beyond under the auspices of the Center for Hellenic Studies of Harvard University, with funding from the National Endowment of Humanities. Collaborative research in the humanities is still rare. Research by undergraduates is rarer still. Teams of undergraduates at each of the nine participating institutions are led by undergraduate project leaders, with participating faculty serving in an advisory capacity. Gustavus undergraduate participants have given presentations, published findings, and participated in the summer HMT seminar at the CHS in Washington DC.

The Homeric poems, the oldest surviving works of literature from the Mediterranean world, were performed in song for centuries. This oral performance context means that many variants arose. These multiforms were preserved in the scholia or marginal commentary of the manuscripts, but are not adequately represented by traditional printed texts, which privilege one version over the others. The HMT project, the first of its kind in Homeric studies, seeks to present the textual transmission of the Iliad and Odyssey in a historical framework.

The Venetus A manuscript of the Iliad is a 10th century Byzantine manuscript brought to Italy from Constantinople during the Renaissance by Cardinal Basileios Bessarion and housed in the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice. Until it was digitized under a Creative Commons License in 1997, it was accessible only to a handful of paleographers. Now you can view it in high resolution at the Homer Multitext website.