Abstract
Philosophy played a crucial role in shaping the intellectual geography of Europe in the late Middle Ages and the early modernity. Between 1250 and 1450, ‘philosophy’ (philosophia) embraced a diverse set of disciplines that included logic, physics, psychology, ethics, and metaphysics. These fields thrived through the reception of Aristotle and a novel application of the arts of ‘trivium’ and ‘quadrivium’. Following a historiographical narrative rooted in the early 20th c. scholarship has commonly considered Paris and its university as the exclusive origin of such an academic framework. This approach led scholars to neglect the role played by other European universities of the time and their specific practices of teaching and learning philosophy. For instance, many Italian universities and even the oldest one, Bologna, have often been considered as an ‘exception’ to or a ‘variant’ of the Parisian model. This project aims to reshape this narrative by shedding light on the multifaceted cultural network of the ‘Regnum Italiae’. This rich cultural landscape will be brought back into the broader picture of the European intellectual history: from being an ‘Italian Exception’ to be finally acknowledged as a central chapter of our European Heritage. TeLPh has three main goals. First, to shed new light on northern and central Italian universities as cultural crossroads where philosophy, sciences, law, and medicine were taught and learned in connection with the urban context of the communes and the Mendicants’ studia. Second, to analyze how the Latin-speaking educational system of masters and students met and merged with the Vernacular literature and the practical teachings of the city lay schools. Third, to challenge central assumptions about the history of medieval philosophy and our cultural heritage. TeLPh will adopt a ground-breaking methodology and epistemological model to develop a comprehensive open-access database ARTES (Archive and Repository of Texts and Statutes) concerning masters, works, normative texts. ARTES will work both as prototype and incubator for future projects and will be included in a website where additional datasets, texts, and sources will be made accessible to the wider public. The cross-cultural nature of TeLPh is nurtured by the cross-disciplinary blending of our team, which includes experts in the history of philosophy, social and institutional history, history of sciences, codicology, paleography and philology. The project will contribute substantively to the pan-European research infrastructure for the Arts and the Humanities (particularly DARIAH) in consideration of the project’s openness towards international collaborations aimed at nurturing a better appreciation of the European cultural heritage. Moreover, TeLPh will reassess the history of medieval and early modern philosophy in terms of ‘science for citizens’, engaging with a proactive outreach strategy to broadcast our results also to non-specialised audiences and stakeholders. Ourcomes TeLPh addressed three main objectives: (1) it investigated northern and central Italian universities as cultural crossroads in which philosophy, the sciences, law, and medicine developed in interaction with the urban context and with the studia of the Mendicant orders; (2) it analysed the relationship between the Latin educational system and vernacular literary and practical teaching traditions; and (3) it contributed to a reassessment of key assumptions in the history of medieval philosophy and of the broader cultural heritage. A central outcome of the project was the design and full implementation of ARTES (Archive and Repository of Texts and Statutes), an open-access database devoted to masters, works, and normative texts. The integrated open-access database ARTES (Archive and Repository of Texts and Statutes) hosted in the website https://telph.it has been developed to make available different types of materials collected and studied by the five Units of Research within the TeLPh project. Specifically, the database has been subdivided into five sections, different in structure, purpose and content, which have a common objective: to reconstruct the teaching and learning of philosophy in the Regnum Italiae, with particular attention to the case of the Studia of Bologna. The sections deal with the masters and their works, the codices, the statutes of the colleges and a part dedicated to the texts. ARTES has been designed as both a research tool and an incubator for future initiatives. It is built to grow through new datasets, additional texts, and ongoing collaborations. Following the data entry and system refinement phases, the TeLPh project website was made publicly accessible in February 2026, marking a major milestone in the project’s development. With its launch, a new phase begins – one that invites scholars and the wider public to explore, contribute to, and shape its future development. Each research unit also completed its specific research programme through publications, participation in conferences and workshops, and a range of dissemination activities. In addition, two scientific conferences were organised within the framework of the project, in collaboration with other projects and Institutions. The TeLPh project organized two International conferences: - Matematica, Scienze e Medicina nel Regnum Italiae (1250-1450): Nuove prospettive di ricerca hold on 5-6 December 2024 at the Università di Roma Tor Vergata. The conference was co-organized with other national and international projects and concluded with a panel discussion during which the ARTES database was presented. - Desiring Knowledge. Philosophy in Bologna and the Regnum Italiae (1250–1450), co-organised by the Societas Artistarum and TeLPh was hold in Bergamo from 2 to 4 October 2025. It has feature contributions from many of our research team members and specialists from abroad. The Research Unit of Bologna, in particular, contributed to both the conceptual design and the implementation of the ARTES database and organising materials related to the teaching of grammar and logic in late medieval Italian universities, particularly Bologna. The Unit identified and analysed a corpus of unpublished manuscript texts, with special attention to logical commentaries attributed to Gentile da Cingoli and to medical and philosophical commentaries on authorities such as Galen and Aristotle. The Unit leader (prof. C. Marmo) carried out philological work on previously unedited texts, contributing to studies on medical semiotics and scientific methodology. In particular, he devoted special attention to a group of logical commentaries attributed to the arts master Gentile of Cingoli on the works belonging to the so-called Logica vetus (Isagoge, Categories, and Perihermenias). The texts survive within a Scriptum super artem veterem transmitted by four codices. Whenever feasible, the manuscripts were inspected directly; otherwise, the work relied on digital images. The outcome of this stage was the preparation of the descriptive data later incorporated into the ARTES database. He also began transcribing from various commentaries on Galen’s Ars Parva (Microtegni), two of them ascribed to Bartolomeo da Varignana and Mondino de’ Liuzzi, one probbaly composed by Taddeo da Parma, and some others unascribed, preserved in various codices. He also transcribed parts of the commentary on Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics by Matteo da Gubbio and some of his questions on logic preserved in a Florentine manuscript. Some of these texts have been used by Costantino Marmo for a contribution article on medical semiotics at the last conference of the project TeLPh, and by Costantino Marmo and Francesco Bellucci for a joint article on resolutio and compositio as scientific methods in medicine, which will be published on Blityri, an international journal devoted to the history of linguistic and semiotic ideas. From March 2024 the activities of the unit benefited from the collaboration of Dr Matteo Stettler, appointed as postdoctoral research fellow (assegnista di ricerca) within the project. His contribution concerned both the digital infrastructure and the philological work on the texts. On the one hand, he participated in the testing phase and in the progressive completion of the ARTES database, including the compilation of the records relating to authors (Maestri) and their works (Opere). On the other hand, he was engaged in the revision and study of the transcriptions of Gentile da Cingoli’s commentaries on the treatises of the Logica vetus (Isagoge, Categories, and De interpretatione), as well as on the Liber sex principiorum. Working in close cooperation with the head of the Bologna unit, Dr Stettler prepared the database entries for several authors (Gentilis de Cingulo, Jordanus de Tridentia, Iacobus de Placentia, Cambiolus Bononiensis, and Anselmus de Guittis de Cumis), and produced the corresponding entries for the texts attributed to the same group of authors, 47 in total. Dr Stettler’s fellowship formally ended on 28 February 2025, but his collaboration with the project continued afterwards. On October 2-4, 2025, he participated in the international conference “Desiring Knowledge. Philosophy in Bologna and the Regnum Italiae (1250-1450)” organized at the University of Bergamo in the context of the present research project, presenting a talk by the title “Gentile da Cingoli e il suo commento al Liber sex principiorum”, a version of which is forthcoming in Quaderni di Noctua. In this later phase, he also worked alongside Costantino Marmo on the preparation of the critical edition of Gentile da Cingoli’s Reportationes super Libro sex principiorum, which represents one of the main scholarly outcomes of the research conducted by the Bologna unit. The text has been published in December 2025 in the book series Flumen sapientiae by Aracne editrice and is available in open access on their website
Dettagli del progetto
Responsabile scientifico: Costantino Marmo
Strutture Unibo coinvolte:
Dipartimento delle Arti
Coordinatore:
Università degli Studi di ROMA Tor Vergata(Italy)
Contributo totale Unibo: Euro (EUR) 46.824,00
Durata del progetto in mesi: 24
Data di inizio
17/10/2023
Data di fine:
28/02/2026
