Latin Textual Scholarship in the Digital Age: An Open-Access Critical Edition of Ovid’s Ibis and its Scholia

FAIN: FEL-262218-19

Thomas John Keeline, Jr
Washington University (St. Louis, MO 63130-4862)

A digital critical edition of The Ibis, a work by the renowned ancient Roman poet Ovid (43 BCE - 18 CE).

I will prepare an open-access digital critical edition of The Ibis, a poem by the Latin poet Ovid, along with the marginal annotations (“scholia”) found in its manuscripts. My edition will be published by the Library of Digital Latin Texts, a new venture established to provide a home for peer-reviewed digital editions of Latin texts and to make such editions accessible to the world. The Ibis, although written by one of Rome’s best-known poets and a fascinating poem in its own right, steeped in learned intertextuality and recondite mythological references, has long been neglected, in part because of the lack of a suitable edition. In previous work I have shown that the standard text of the poem can be significantly improved, and that the current edition of the scholia is unsatisfactory. My project will help revitalize the study of this work, and it will also showcase the power of digital critical editions of Latin texts to transcend the limitations of traditional print editions.