The notion of scholarship encompasses a variety of meanings as testified by the French and Italian translations: erudition or erudizione both insist on the precious knowledge of a happy few, while the English term and to some extent the German Gelehrsamkeit, include its teaching and its transmission. The English and German scholar is seen primarily as a teacher, whereas the French érudit tends to keep his research and his area of expertise to himself. Which is probably why the French and the Italian words often sound ambivalent: to  call someone an érudit is to pay a tribute to his vast knowledge but also to point out the irrelevant or perfunctory nature of the research he is engaged in. Words seem here to adequately convey the different situations scholars are facing today in our society, emphasizing how our way of thinking and studying is fashioned through different professional, academic and social contexts.

Antiquity embraces the same linguistic complexity. We often forget that the Roman Empire wasn’t a Greco-Latin world only. Recent Syriac, Coptic or Arabic studies have lifted a corner of the multilinguistic veil of the Ancient World. In their wake, the current project aims at exploring this multilinguistic reality, extending our research beyond the Eastern part of the Mediterranean area to include the Far East and the West. Talking about his Numidian countrymen in Late Antiquity, Augustine of Hippo mentioned Punic as a living language. What kind of language is he refering to? Hannibal’s tongue or a deformed and decayed dialect? How did local languages resist the grip Latin and Greek got on Northern Africa? As we study linguistic exchange, resistance, or decline, we hope to bring to light a hitherto hidden world whose specific fields of knowledge have often been disregarded or ignored.

Our project will focus on scholars and the way they have managed to build up and pass on  knowledge through these complex socio-linguistic situations. Cultural transmission is to be seen in its double dimension as both geographical and social. Scholars had their own methods, their vocabulary, their social and cultural codes, but they still had to be understood by others to reach out different communities, from their patrons to a larger readership of amateurs or laymen. Though their professional idiom had to be specific, the use of the vernacular meant that they kept an open window on the outside world. In some cases, languages could shield ethnic groups (Syriac, Coptic) from religious threats or preserve philosophical knowledge from ideological attacks (classical philosophy in Arabic Damascus). But even when they were challenged, languages  always tried to convince and therefore to communicate and transmit knowledge. Under these circumstances, how could academic concepts, scientific methods, religious thought, and other specific preoccupations be transferred from one part of the Mediterranean to the other, and how could they be transmitted beyond their natural geographic and professional boundaries? Inevitably scholars will have to be studied together with their social environment. Investigating these ancient intellectual, social and religious boundaries will bring together not only historians and classicists, but also mathematicians and ethno-linguists, and will enable us to question the dividing lines between the fields and categories of modern knowledge.