I study the Council of Ferrara–Florence (1438–1439) in which the union of the Eastern and Western Churches was negotiated and even achieved, though it was only a short-lived union. I focus on the manuscripts which were used in the Council and their differences and authority. The sacred scripture, patristic texts and the acts and decrees of the ecumenical councils were important to the theologians and other learned men present in the Council. They were used in the argumentation of theological dogmas and other ecclesiastical matters. Problem was that same text had different readings in different manuscripts. There were Greek and Latin manuscripts brought from East and West to the Council and translations of the important texts were even produced for the Council’s need. In my study, I am interested in the role which this Council and its theological disputes had in the development of humanist textual criticism. Though the humanists of the 15th century were interested in the classical texts of Antiquity, religious texts had a major impact on the humanist thinking and on the need to develop textual criticism and translation of Greek and Latin texts.

As a part of the project SCISMA, I will study the monastery of Grottaferrata and the Schism. The monastery of Grottaferrata, which followed the Byzantine rite but had close ties to the Roman papacy, was situated in the Roman countryside, surrounded by the lands of the Roman barons and not too far away from the Roman papal court. The Schism created a new reality in which the monastery had to find a way to survive by allying with the right pope. I will study the ways in which the monastery operated in order to survive and how it had to reshape its loyalties and even its identity during this crisis.

In the consortium "Profiling Premodern Authors", we worked with anonymous texts of Antiquity, Middle Ages and Early Modern period via computational methods and our aim was to retrace the author. I was responsible for preparing the data, Latin works of Medieval and Early Modern authors, for the project. Besides, I had my own attribution case from Early Modern period. Article about that is forthcoming.