The IThAC Project

The IThAC project aims to study the reception of ancient theatre in 16th century Europe by analysing the corpus of printed scholarly paratexts devoted to it at the time and to make the French translation of this corpus available to the scientific community by constructing a scalable digital interface. We hypothesize that the collection, translation and analysis of this corpus, long-neglected because it is physically difficult to access and because it is mostly written in Latin, or even Greek, will allow us to grasp how ancient theatre was received and understood by its “inventors” in 16th century Europe, and how the ideas and methods they conveyed – at the very time that modern theatre and philology were invented – were circulated and developed thanks in particular to the wide distribution made possible by print.


Project leader: Université Grenoble-Alpes

Project partner: Pascale Paré-Rey: Jean Moulin Lyon 3 University (UMR 5189 – HISOMA, “History and Sources of the Ancient Worlds” research unit)

Project length: 48 months