The Project “MaximHum” (PRIN 2022 PNRR - P2022837KN): Humanistic Italy and sixteenth-century Muscovy in dialogue

The paper introduces the portal on Maximus the Greek, a project aimed at enhancing his literary and cultural heritage and documenting his relationship with Humanism. The digitization and digital mapping of Maximus the Greek’s production will fill the almost total absence in this field of coherent and structured digital realities and solutions. The portal will be the first digital space entirely dedicated to Maximus the Greek and constitute the first complete database of his published works and translations into modern European languages. It will be a freely accessible and explorable space that can be consulted without restriction and that, thanks to the use of English and Russian, as well as Italian, will also be usable on a European and international scale. Such a portal will encourage and support investigations into the Italian phase of Maximus’ life, the western sources of his Slavic production, the method of humanistic philology he applied in the revision of sacred texts in the Slavic language, and the western influences in his language. The results that will be achieved in each area will create a new awareness of the scope of Maximus’ work and activity, opening up a new historiographic vision and understanding of the 16th-century evolution of Russian culture. This paper underlines the institutional framework and general scope of the project, offers a brief state of art, and then focuses on the main concerning of each research unit: 1. Maximus the Greek’s life and work: a digital map (University of Pisa unit); 2. Maximus the Greek’s language: a digital thesaurus (University of Chieti-Pescara unit); 3. Maximus the Greek and the Scripture: the textual tradition (University of Bologna unit).