The medieval literature of otherworld journeys (500 - 1000 CE): an anthology

• Grant number: 24/13263-4
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: February 01, 2025
• End date: October 31, 2027
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Classical Languages
• Principal Investigator: Paulo Sérgio de Vasconcellos
• Grantee: Tiago Augusto Nápoli
• Host Institution: Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem (IEL). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil

Abstract

According to the medieval imagination, the men and women of the period are wanderers. Their errant nature would have originated from a decisive act - the Expulsion from Eden - whose effect, it is believed, hovers over all humanity. They are pilgrims, real or imaginary, who travel through this world and the Otherworld in order to better understand what they believe to be the divine plan. The present work aims to study one of the aspects of such socio-religious belief, namely, the so-called journey narratives to the land of the dead, one of the most widespread literary genres of the entire Middle Ages. To this end, our objective is to produce, at an international level, the most extensive and annotated anthology of primary Latin sources from the Early Middle Ages (AD 500 - 1000) belonging to that genre. In parallel, we aim to systematically recover, through our critical apparatus, the possible intertextual relationships of such writings with classical works (or excerpts) commonly pointed out as some of their possible literary models.