On the Way to an Integral Edition of the Book of Marco Polo: A First Attempt to Create a Digital Edition

We present a new scholarly digital project: the critical edition of the book of Marco Polo – more precisely, the critical reconstruction of the contents of the lost original text, presented in a hypertextual frame, in the form of a “critical translation”. The project has been drawn up by Marina Buzzoni (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice) and ourselves: Work will begin by the end of 2017, thanks to the commitment of a team of young Venetian researchers (among others, Irene Reginato and Vito Santoliquido), and of some Italian scholars (among others, Alvise Andreose and Giuseppe Mascherpa, who are here today). The critical edition of the Devisement dou monde (henceforth DM) is the logical development of the philological work begun by Mario Eusebi and Eugenio Burgio in 2005, and of the digital experiment completed with the edition of Giovan Battista Ramusio’s Milione (2015). In this occasion we would like to present the intellectual reasons that have bolstered (and still bolster) our project, and to show a demo that illustrates its operational mechanisms. Finally, our talk also aims to seize the opportunity to invite anyone interested in our project – philologists, historians, anthropologists, geographers and so on – to cooperate with us, in order to produce a (hopefully) authoritative tool devoted to Asian knowledge in the European Middle Ages.