Original Research

Joanny Moulin
Aix Marseille Univ, CAER, Aix-en-Provence, France

# For an Atlas of Intellectual Migrations in the Mediterranean of the Thirteenth Century

Valerio Manzari, Liceo Scientifico "Severi," Italy
Joanny Moulin, Aix-Marseille Université, France
Francesca Manzari, Aix-Marseille Université, France

**Received:** 02/25/2024; **Accepted:** 03/01/2024; **Published:** 08/29/2024

**Abstract:** This article is a presentation of research project "Atlas of Intellectual Migrations in the Mediterranean of the 13th Century" (AIMM13), taking its inspiration for Franco Moretti's geocriticism, which it would inflect in three ways at least. First, it would work on the hypothesis that the relationship between landscape and literature is a symbiotic coproduction: Geography generates the novel, as Moretti observed, but the reverse is also true, as literature generates and fashions our landscapes. Second, this is even more easily verifiable if the definition of literature is extended to include what Genette called diction, that is, nonfictional texts in the wider sense. Third, this investigation of how geographical and literary texts coproduce one another calls for the development of specific digital humanities tools or LGIS (Literary Geographical Information System) geoinformatics means, which will lead to the digital publication of dynamic maps along with the written results of research. A particularly promising study case for the development of such an innovative method is Southern Italy at the time of Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, considered as a node of civilizational evolution in the Mediterranean of the thirteenth century.

**Keywords:** Geocriticism, Fiction and Diction, Franco Moretti, Frederick II Hohenstaufen, Mediterranean, Geographic Information Systems, Cultural Transfers, Polysystems

## Introduction

Wherever we are, the landscapes we are bound to inhabit are always four-dimensional, for our three-dimensional consciousness of space is always augmented, more or less acutely according to our degree of cultural awareness, by the diachronic dimension of its historical evolutions. This is certainly more obvious in cities, especially in capital cities, where the layers of the past appear as if visibly superimposed to one another. As we move away from urban centers, the perspectives open out onto longer durations, in the sense of Fernand Braudel's *"longue durée"* (Braudel 1958), possibly to reach prehistorical or even geological scales. And there are more than four dimensions, insofar as to the historical are added the literary axes of landscape perception, fictional or else, but also the philosophical, the cinematographic, the theological, the mythological, or the ideological, to name but a few of the cultural dimensions of our sense of place. The age of globalization increases our awareness of the poly-dimensionality of all landscapes, while the advancements of

<figure><img src="image_1.png" /></figure>
philosophy and literary science have foregrounded the osmotic porosity of facticity or the permeability of the literary with the non-literary.

## Geography and Diction

Reflecting on “the *ortgebunden*, place-bound nature of literary forms” (Moretti 1998, 5) in his *Atlas of the European Novel*, Franco Moretti noted that

> Placing a literary phenomenon in its specific space—mapping it—is not the conclusion of geographical work; it’s the *beginning*…one looks at the map *and thinks*. You look at a specific configuration…and try to understand how it is that all this gives rise to a story, a plot. How is it, I mean, that *geography shapes the narrative structure of the European novel*. (1998, 7–8)

But it has hardly been emphasized enough how much the converse is also true. In other words, while geography is indeed the mental representation of space in which the novel takes place, reciprocally the novel constructs the geographical space it describes and in which its characters move and its plots unfold. In like manner, the novel is generated by the geographical market where it is written, published, translated, and read. But conversely the economical map that is its habitat is constantly modified by the partly unpredictable living trajectories and cultural transfers of literary works. Because our Lebenswelt, the habitat in which we live, is always a landscape, that is to say a geography, a vision of the world, our relation to it is one of co-creation: the world creates us as we create it in return. Thus, even the imaginary universes of speculative fiction are not only derived from our living milieu—what Tolkien called the “primary world”— but they are integrated into it as they become part of world culture.

There is a two-way, symbiotic relationship between literature and geography as our Lebenswelt, as the mental map of our common habitat. Thus, Provence, the troubadours, the Minnesänger, and the poets of the Sicilian School co-create one another, as well as Paris and Victor Hugo’s or Patrick Modiano’s novels, or Frank Herbert’s *Dune* and the Sahara. The co-creation is even more obvious if fiction is understood to include the cinema as well as the novel. More strikingly, the co-creative symbiosis between literature and geography is seen to have relevance beyond the bounds of the imaginary if “literature” is understood in the wider sense of the term, as inclusive of nonfiction, or what Gérard Genette has called “diction.” Fiction is determined by the “thematic criterion”—“relative to the content of the text (what the text is ‘about’).” Diction is determined by the “rhematic criterion”—“relative to the character of the text itself and to the type of discourse it exemplifies.” One of the modes of diction is poetry, which like fiction belongs to the “constitutive regime” of literariness. “The other mode of diction, non-fictional prose, can be perceived as literary only in a conditional fashion, that is, by virtue of an individual attitude, such as Stendhal’s view of the style in which the French Civil Code was written” (Genette 1993, viii). Indeed, Stendhal wrote to
Balzac in 1840: “When I wrote the Charterhouse, to pick up the right tone I read two or three pages of the Civil Code every morning” (“En composant la Chartreuse, pour prendre le ton je lisais chaque matin deux ou trois pages du Code civil”) (Stendhal 1933, 277). And indeed, both Stendhal and Balzac are epigones of literary realism, whose trespassing of the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, beyond the mimetic illusionism of what Barthes has called the “effet de réel,” aimed at a fashioning of reality on a mode that is not without some affinity with the contemporary philosophical convictions of American pragmatism. But reciprocally the Code civil, or Code Napoléon, and the impact it had on the legislations of many European and American countries—from Portugal and Spain to Haiti, from Rumania to Louisiana and Canada, or from the Netherlands and the German Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch to post-Risorgimento Italy and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies as early as 1819—is a good example of how dictional or nonfictional literature contributes to shaping political geography and, therefore, to modeling our mental and physical landscapes.

The intuition of the reciprocity of Franco Moretti’s thesis according to which “geography manages to generate the novel” acquires an increased force of conviction when it is applied to literature in the wider sense of the term, that is to say to both fiction and diction (or nonfiction). Many examples readily come to mind, as, for instance, how the philosophy of the French Enlightenment and journalism fostered the French Revolution, or how the writings of Marx and Engels and their epigones transformed the world in the twentieth century; how the American Declaration of Independence, and how treaties, charters, and other texts of law redraw the maps of entire regions of the world; also, how the publications of scientific and technological discoveries have led to metamorphoses of the environment or, on a much larger time scale, how the sacred texts of the several religions have reorganized the geography of the earth and redesigned its landscapes in terms of architecture, urbanism, social customs and costumes, territorial conquests and their variegated consequences, and so on.

To summarize, this project inscribes itself in a comparatist tradition of history and geography of literature that is more particularly associated with the names of Michele Amari, and those of Carlo Dionisotti, or Alberto Asor Rosa (Amari 1857; Dionisotti [1967] 1999; Asor Rosa 1983, 1986), of which Bertrand Westphal’s geocriticism (see esp. Westphal 2007, 2011) and Franco Moretti’s work (see also Moretti 2005, 2013) are the continuations. However, the originality of the method is twofold. On the one hand, it resides in the extension to diction (Genette 1993) of the theory developed by Moretti for fiction, diction being represented chiefly in this case by poetry and philosophical, scientific, or other nonfictional literature in translation. On the other hand, the approach is innovative in so far as it aims not to produce a commentary on historical episodes and geographical situations, but much rather to understand and describe the symbiotic coproduction of landscapes and literatures in the larger sense.
Emperor Frederick II

To try out this new method of research, it is most rewarding to choose to concentrate on the southern part of the Holy Roman Empire or, in other words, Italy and the Kingdom of Sicily, at the time of Emperor Frederick II. For indeed it is a brief period of roughly half a century in a relatively limited geographical era, which was the chronotope (Bakhtin [1981] 2011) of a huge contest of geo-literary forces. For it was the place and time of a metamorphosis of the Western world by the second wave of penetration of Aristotelian philosophy via its Muslim and Jewish commentators, concomitant with the eastward and southward flight of the Trobar as the philosophy-cum-aesthetic of the troubadours. So that Southern Italy, especially in this first half of the twelfth century, was a crossroads of influences, as the *passage obligé* of the main routes of the crusaders to the Holy Land—the alternative land route via the Balkans and Turkey, which had seen the death of Frederick I Barbarossa in 1190, being almost impassably perilous. But it was also the ideological battleground between Pope and Emperor, the former feeling besieged by the latter since Frederick II of Hohenstaufen cumulated the crowns of the Holy Roman Empire and of Sicily, as well as that of Jerusalem.

For Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen (1194–1250) was King of Sicily (1198–), King of the Romans (i.e., of Italy, Germany and Burgundy) (1212–), Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire (1220), and King of Jerusalem (1225–). Aristotelian philosophy provided the Emperor with the intellectual means to build a counter-model to the already challenged Church politics in medieval Europe. And so the reign of Frederick II was a time of great political tension between the Papacy and the Empire, between North and South, between Roman or Byzantine Christianity and Islam and, therefore, of great intellectual motility. Moreover, and in large part because of this, Emperor Frederick’s court was nomadic, always on the move from Sicily—meaning either the island of Trinacria or present-day Southern Italy—to Northern Italy, from Piemonte to Lombardy and Veneto, and from Germany to Cyprus and the Holy Land (Frederick was also King of Jerusalem). Withal, a constant exchange of letters, and other texts, with princes, philosophers, and savants of all walks of the known world. Those were the days of an intense cultural struggle, which not only prefigured the modern era but in fact set it in motion.

In this context, Frederick II's mobile court was the door of knowledge (Delle Donne 2019); an itinerant and open locus, the vagrant meeting place of men of science, savants, and poets from around the world: Provençal troubadours and German Minnesänger who set the example for the Sicilian School of Poetry, that originated the dolce stil novo of Guido Guinizzelli, Dante, and Cavalcanti; Jewish and Christian scholars who translated Greek philosophy from Arabic into Latin, especially Aristotle's, and the Commentaries of Averroes, thus enabling their dissemination in the Western world; philosophers who cultivated the dialogue with Muslim thinkers; the Pisan mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci and other scientists, rhetoricians (or *dictatores*) and masters of eloquence of the School of Padova who contributed to forging the “Ghibelline” style and rationalist thinking in the confrontation
with their papist, “Guelf” opponents; artists, architects, sculptors, who created original works at the crossroads of diverse aesthetic traditions.

Frederick II's world was both ephemeral and perennial—ephemeral because his final military and political defeat left its opponents in a dominant position for several centuries still, and perennial because it lay the basis of our European modernity, in the concert of nations and migrations between South and North. Its landscapes are *mappae migrationum*, migratory maps, in the plural sense, showing movements, ephemeral and transitory states of history in the making, representing transmigrations, metamorphoses, translocations, migrations of populations, of individuals, of texts, and so of knowledge, ideas, and modes of thinking.

A geocritical study of this chronotope is bound to trace the trajectories of the traveling court of the Emperor, of which the University of Naples founded by Frederick II in 1224 is only one aspect among many, like a moving and protean site of transmigration of humanity, and of the humanities, in the Late Middle Ages, that competed with, while strongly distinguishing itself from, other contemporary epicenters of knowledge, like Cordoba and Toledo in Andalusia, Marseille, and Montpellier or Lunel (Nîmes), in the intellectual melting pot of the Mediterranean. What distinguished the Frederician model was the vision of a Western world open to diversity—internally, from the Germanic North to the Latin South, including the Jewish and Muslim communities, and externally, linking an already complicated Holy Roman Empire with the Holy Land, the Near East, the Maghreb, and Andalusia, but also the neighboring kingdoms of France, England, or Hungary, and also the Eastern Roman Empire. Frederick II's vision sketches out a migratory model whose relevance in today's Mediterranean is both obvious and too often forgotten.

Beyond any form of romantic idealization, like Ernst Kantorowicz's biography (Kantorowicz 1931), or of sterile hero-baiting, like David Abulafia's (1992), Frederick II's vision of the world, very imperfectly achieved and short-lived as it was, cast a bridge between the Renaissance of the twelfth century and the early-modern era. Picking up the torch of the Toledo School of translators in its period of decline, between the death of Archbishop Raimundo in 1151 and the accession of Alfonso X to the throne of Castile in 1252, Frederick II continued the ambitious cultural policy of his maternal grandfather, King Roger II of Sicily. But, as a consequence of his father Henry VI's marriage with Roger II's daughter Constance, Frederick inherited the crowns of Sicily (1198), of King of the Romans (1212), of Holy Roman Emperor (1220), and of King of Jerusalem (1225) by marriage with Isabella, daughter of John of Brienne, also remembered as one of the poets of the Sicilian School.

An immense political power was thus concentrated in the hands of a young prince (King at 4, Emperor at 26) with an exceptionally gifted mind, who dreamed Sicily and Southern Italy as the epicenter of the Western Roman Empire *redivivus*, reasserting the Mediterranean once more very concretely as the center of the world. Thus, the Holy See found itself besieged in its temporal power, the Papal States surrounded by an emperor ruling both Germany and Southern Italy where he chose to reside. But the Pope also found himself very seriously
challenged in his spiritual power, by a Frederick of Hohenstaufen who deliberately developed an extremely potent cultural policy. Having masterfully consolidated his power base in Germany, Frederick undertook to organize his Kingdom of Sicily as a model state, founding the University of Naples in 1224 to create a class of civil servants of what Kantorowicz saw as the prototype of modern bureaucracy. Pope Gregory IX had already excommunicated him in 1227 when Frederick won the Sixth Crusade (1228–1229) conquering Jerusalem without bloodshed for ten years by mere negotiation with the Sultan of Egypt, thanks to the diplomatic correspondence in Arabic he had led with al-Kamil for several years. Having reconquered his Kingdom of Sicily that had been invaded by the Pope in his absence, he endowed it with a new legal code, the Constitutions of Melfi (*Liber augustalis*) in 1231, that owed more to ancient Roman law and Greek philosophy than to the doctrines of the Church, and grounded a cult of *Justicia*, of which the Emperor was the incarnation. Frederick was excommunicated a second time in 1239, then deposed in 1245 by Pope Innocent IV at the Council of Lyon, but fought to the bitter end, until his death in 1250, at the age of 56, fighting literally to survive the hatred of a mortal foe, who had sworn the destruction of the Hohenstaufen dynasty, and of their Ghibelline heresy.

The struggle between Emperor and Pope was intellectual and ideological even before it was political and military. The School of Capua, of which Pietro della Vigna was the chief luminary, was a methodical effort to forge a lay rhetorical style that could surpass the powers of conviction of the Roman Curia. It produced model letters that were imitated by the notaries and other functionaries of the imperial administration, but also potent missives, encyclicals, pamphlets, and other vectors of imperial discourse in home affairs and foreign diplomacy alike. Moreover, it was an effect of the Emperor's will that his dignitaries should, like himself, practice poetry, chiefly in imitation of the Provençal troubadours, some of whom, after the Cathar Crusade (1209–1229), came to Northern Italy, others also exerting indirect influence via the German Minnesänger. This was chiefly a purposeful effort to court excellence and to compete for intellectual and literary leadership in Europe, which resulted in the emergence of the Sicilian School of Poetry, composed of poets expressing themselves in what could be called “synthetic Sicilian,” comparable to McDiarmid’s “synthetic Scots,” that is, a common koine above the various South-Italian dialects, in which Dante, in the *De vulgari eloquentia* (1303–1304), would recognize the *siciliano aulico*, the first literary language of national expression in Italy. The same relentless yearning for intellectual primacy motivated Frederick II’s quest for knowledge. Always accompanied by his court philosopher—Michel Scot from 1227 to 1236, then Theodore of Antioch—whose role was partly to be an expert in astrology, in accordance with the convictions of the time, but who was only a prominent figure in an Areopagus of savants, whom the Emperor kept busy translating and discussing chosen philosophical texts, mostly from the Arabic and the Hebrew. Incidentally, as Alain de Libera remarks, we only know Averroes’ Great Commentary of Aristotle’s *De anima* through its Latin translation by Scot, the original text in Arabic being lost (Libera 1998). Frederick’s personal commitment to writing his cynegetic
treatise of falconry, *De venandi cum avibus*, which would retain unequaled authoritativeness for
several centuries, demonstrate the qualities of an exceptionally gifted, thoroughgoing researcher
in natural science, and a surprisingly modern mentality in the quest for experimental proof. At
a time when Thomas Aquinas was still a student at the University of Naples, recently founded
by the Emperor, Frederick the Aristotelian criticized Alexander's master on grounds that had
nothing to do with those of papal censorship:

*Inter alia*, we discovered by hard-won experience that the deductions of Aristotle, whom we followed when they appealed to our reason, were not entirely to be relied upon, more particularly in his descriptions of the characters of certain birds. There is another reason why we do not follow implicitly the Prince of Philosophers: he was ignorant of the practice of falconry—an art which to us has ever been a pleasing occupation, and with the details of which we are well acquainted. (Frederick II 1943, 3–4)

The Magna Curia, Frederick II's imperial court, also had in common with the troubadours its nomadism: Ceaselessly in movement, Frederick did not have a capital city, although Naples, and Foggia, and their whereabouts were among his favorite haunts. The Court of Frederick II is best envisioned as a living organism, a prefiguration of Hobbes's Leviathan, made of an indefinite and fluctuating number of individual human beings, that moves about, and travels, changing shapes in the historical course of its life. Many chroniclers have underlined the oriental aspect of Frederick and his court, the Saracen guards, the houri dancers, and the whole magnificent retinue, with the exotic menagerie, the hunting cheetahs, the elephant, and the caravan of camels that he took over the Alps and deep into Germany. But few have noted that "plurilingual library like no other in medieval Europe...universal and diachronic...an 'open' library...with books in Latin, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Provençal, French, texts in 'Italian,' perhaps also in German...from all regions of Europe and the Byzantine East" (Petrucci 1983, 523). Also less often noted is the ceaseless correspondence, the couriers that kept traveling to and fro, carrying letters regarding the military operations, the economic affairs, the diplomatic relations, and the intellectual preoccupations of the Emperor and his court. One should not envision a fixed place, for really there was none in particular, but an ever-changing nebula, composed of individuals present and absent, producing, translating, and discussing diverse texts, of which it will be instructive to map the movements and variations over the comparatively brief period of Frederick II's fifty-two years reign.

State of the Art

The overall question has often been summed up, but under the veneer of popularization the
field of research is in fact characterized by a great diffraction and apparent complexity. This can
be explained by several contradictory factors. The most obvious explanation is that the question
has been over-studied, especially since the nineteenth century, when the passion for philological
historicism was fueled, more particularly in this case, by both German and Italian cultural nationalism. In short, there has been a great profusion of studies on Frederick II of Svevia, down to the present day. To this are added the distorting effects of the strongly controversial figure of the Emperor: Antichrist or heretic “Epicurean” for some, prefiguration of Renaissance man and proto-Nietzschean hero for others. Libeled by some sources, like Pope Innocent IV, or the monk Salimbene de Adam, transformed into a mythical or legendary figure by others, like the English chronicler Matthew Paris, Frederick II the Ghibelline Emperor is a strongly fictionalized historical personage, all the more so because he was the first literary author of himself, by a process very much like the deification of the ancient Roman emperors. This ambiguous facticity of Frederick II of Svevia has repeatedly been amplified by unscrupulous vulgarizing biographers, and the aura of mystery that surrounds the personage suddenly thickened in 1943, when the State Archive of Naples was destroyed by elements of the retreating Wehrmacht, so that the original manuscript ledgers of Frederick’s reign, seven-centuries old, went up in flames, and remain forever lost, except for a microfilm copy of a few months of 1239 to 1240.

However, substantial parts of these primary sources have been edited and published, chiefly since the nineteenth century. Among the historians who have made some of the most important contributions to Frederician studies, one should mention the Frenchman Jean-Louis-Alphonse Huillard-Bréholles (Huillard-Bréholles and Luynes 1852; Huillard-Bréholles 1865), and German scholars like Ludwig Weiland or Wolfgang Stürner, and Walter Koch, among many others (see, e.g., Weiland 1846; Stürner 1996; Koch et al. 2017). But most of the time the information is scattered in a great diversity of fonts (see, e.g., Muratori 1936; Pertz 1864; Luard 1876). On the face of it, the dispersion of the relevant information on Frederician intellectuals and their textual productions is daunting. Fortunately, most of the primary sources, and some of the secondary sources as well, have been digitalized and are available in free open access. Moreover, the search for documentary information is further facilitated by the existence of several online tools, some of which have already partly processed the data. Thus, the Naples State Archives and the Vatican Apostolic Archives are accessible online, the latter containing more particularly, in their Paleografia Latina section, the manuscript of the *De venandi cum avibus* (Pal. lat. 1071). Some other tools offer precious resources, as for instance the *Enciclopedia Federiciana* of the Istituto Giovanni Treccani in Roma, which offers authoritative précis on individuals, texts, and places, indexed by names. The Treccani *Federiciana* is useful as a first resort to quickly gather essential facts, and it provides a substantial bibliography for each entry. For direct access to primary sources, another precious tool is the Hannoverian *Monumenta Germaniae Historica* (MGH) hosted by the Bavarian State Library in Munich, offering a treasure of facsimiles of print editions of texts, chiefly in Latin and German. Among other remarkable online resources offering a choice number of rare sources in free open access, one should also mention the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and also the *Regesta Imperii* (RI) of the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz (Germany), focusing on documents relative to the Roman-German kings and emperors as well as of the popes of the Middle Ages. Yet
another very useful source is Muratori's *Rerum italicarum scriptores*, made accessible online by the Centro di studi muratoniani in Modena (Italy).

## Of Texts and Men

A first method of approach to the field of research is best described as a form of prosopography, defined as “multiple career-line analysis,” or “the investigation of the common background characteristics of a group of actors in history by means of a collective study of their lives” (Stone 1971, 46). The objective is to study the careers, the trajectories, of the individuals who contributed to animating the fertile intellectual milieu of Frederick II’s reign. The image of concentric circles could be misleading in the case of such a mobile dispositive, but it may help to describe a complex situation, made up of the close entourage of the Emperor, among other contemporary movements. Very schematically, the brief evocation of three of the luminaries participating in the philosophical debates of the Frederician court—Michael Scot, Theodore of Antioch, and Jacob Anatoli—can efficiently illuminate the field of study by a telling example.

Michael Scot was a Scotsman who had studied in Oxford, Paris, and Toledo, where he translated al-Bitruji (Alpetragius) in 1217. In 1220 he was in Bologna, under the protection of the Pope, and a few years later refused the archbishopric of Cashel in Ireland, and after Honorius III’s death in 1227 he became the Emperor’s philosopher, chief astrologer, and epicenter of the intellectual encounters. His successor in this post was Theodore of Antioch, an Arabic-speaking polymath from Syria, having studied astrology, philosophy, law, and medicine in Mosul and Baghdad, Master of Philosophy in Jerusalem, from where he joined Frederick’s court, perhaps as an envoy of the Sultan of Egypt, before 1230. Jacob Anatoli, Jewish philosopher, medical doctor, and translator, was born in Marseille, in 1194 like Frederick, and was the disciple and son-in-law of Samuel Ibn Tibbon, well known as the translator of Maimonides who was at the origin of the first Maimonidean controversy (1180–1232) in the Jewish community of Provence. This controversy is undoubtedly the reason why Jacob Anatoli came to establish himself in Naples in 1231, where he founded a school of philosophy.

These intellectuals, along with others, like, for example, Judah Ben Solomon Ha-Cohen, from Toledo, converged from various parts of the world (Britain, Spain, Provence, the Near East, etc.) to play important parts, not only in the intellectual debates that regularly took place at the Court of Frederick II, or by correspondence as in the case of the well-known “Sicilian Questions” addressed to several philosophers of the Arab world, but also in translating certain texts from Arabic into Hebrew and Latin, especially the works of Averroes and Maimonides, which augmented the reception of Aristotelean philosophy in the Western world. In doing this, they served the doctrinal interest of the Dominican and Franciscan orders, fostering intellectual ferments that would produce long-term effects in the history of ideas. But this convergence of minds was the result and the mainstay of a deliberate cultural policy, of which the University of Naples was a key instrument, destined to operate primarily as the law school of the Regno di
Sicilia and to train new civil servants for the state apparatus. These justiciars and other imperial functionaries were expected, on the one hand, to be expert rhetoricians in the style of the Capuan School of Pietro della Vigna, and, on the other hand, to write poetry in the Sicilian tongue, in imitation of the Provençal troubadours dislodged by the Cathar Crusade. And that bears witness to the purposeful imperial fostering of the cultural nationalism meant to provide the basis of an intellectual emancipation from the Church. In doing so, Frederick was following in the footsteps of his Norman forebears.

The chief flower of these policies of open-mindedness to cultural diversity, and in particular to the teachings of the Arab world, that fostered the development of the scientific spirit in Southern Italy was certainly the Salerno School of Medicine, which had been attracting students and patients worldwide for more than a century already, with leading figures like the woman gynecologist Trotula (Trota or Trocta), whose treatises were widely circulated in medieval Europe, but of whose biography too little is known.

The medical treatises of the School of Salerno offer good illustrations of the apparently autonomous life of texts, independently of any authors, that traveled around and transformed themselves through diverse processes of translation, adaptation, and citation. Thus, the seventeenth-century antiquarian John Aubrey used to say that “manuscripts went flying around like butterflies through the air” (Aubrey, cited in Scurr 2015, 21, 210, 356). But it is possible to map their dissemination in the Mediterranean world of the thirteenth century. Thus, the biographical Dame Trot, for reasons due in large part to the purposeful erasure of a woman author, has disappeared behind her texts, “Trotula” having become the name of an ensemble of three texts: *De passionibus mulierum (On the Diseases of Women)*, *De curis mulierum (On the Treatment of Women)*, and *Ornatus mulierum (On Women’s Cosmetics)* (see Green 2001). But similar questions are raised by other Salernitan texts of the thirteenth century, such as the texts attributed to a certain “Platerio” that probably indicates a whole dynasty of physicians: *Liber de simplici medicina (or Circa instans)*, *Liber iste (or Glossae Platearii)*, and *Regule urine* (see De Renzi 1857). These are extreme examples of the volatility of texts in the period, including scientific ones, and their capacity to exist and survive independently from their authors. These texts constitute a geographically situated superstructure: the “School of Salerno” means primarily certain texts, that define a certain science and practice of medicine, reputed excellent, that results from a historical openness to Arab medicine and ancient medical treatises via the Arabic language, that people came to Salerno to benefit from or to learn, and that was bound to be translated and used abroad as well. These medical texts exist independently, outside the impetus of the royal and imperial court, but their production is prototypical of the Kingdom of Sicily, that is, Southern Italy, for it is the geographical situation of Sicily, in the middle of the Mediterranean, so much so that Braudel could claim that “Sicily and Tunisia cut the Mediterranean in two” (1972, 114), which, in turn, creates the organic condition of this historical moment.
At the other extreme are the assertively authorized texts, like Frederick II’s *De venandi cum avibus*: a treatise of natural science, which, beyond the descriptions of hunting techniques, is a work of research in ornithological ethology, written with extreme care, and in the obvious intention of surpassing any other text in the world on the topic for a very long time to come. The *De venandi* has no utilitarian scope; it is both a leisurely pursuit and a quest for personal prestige. Completed by Manfred after Frederick’s death, it then slept for several centuries, as a collateral result of the political defeat of its author. Beside such an author’s text, which contributed to forging the myth of Frederick of Svevia, other texts were conceived of as deliberate superstructural monuments, like the *Liber augustalis (Constitutions of Melfi)* that established the legal code of the Kingdom of Sicily, or the Golden Bull of Rimini (1226, or 1235 backdated) in favor of the Teutonic order, which was the cornerstone of the foundation of Prussia, or the 1235 *Mainzer Landsfriede*. Although they bear the seal, name, and signature of the Emperor, they are rather collective productions, issued in one place (Melfi, Rimini, Mainz...) by whose name they are generally remembered, but they produce lasting performative effects in many others. They organize the ideological structure of a geographical space, in which they are destined to be applied as if forever. They are prolonged by related texts of administration, propaganda, and diplomacy, by which the mental everyday life of the land was led.

At a higher superstructural level, differing in degree, but perhaps not in kind, the poetry of the Sicilian School, artificially willed by the Emperor, produces not only a corpus of national poetry but also a national idiom in the process: the Sicilian tongue as koine, and this poetry as Sicilian prototype of Italian literature comes into existence as an alternative to Latin, which is the language of the Church, while thematically cultivating a cult of love that deliberately differs from the Christian doctrine of agape. Much as this new literature is the result of seminal cultural imports from the Provençal *trouvères*, preferably filtered via the much less insolent German *Minnesänger*—in very like manner, the mental space of the Frederician Regno draws its forces of innovation from cultural imports from abroad. Already the *De venandi* necessitated the study of the *Moamyn*, a treatise known by the name of its author, probably Hunayn ibn Ishaq, physician of the Abbasid caliphate in the ninth century, translated for Frederick by Theodore during the siege of Faenza in 1240 to 1241. Likewise, in the domain of fiction, we know that Frederick and his entourage also read poetry and romance in *langues d'oïl* and Breton literature, as the Emperor also possessed copies of the *Palamèdes* or *Guiron le courtois*, of the *Roman de Troie* and the *Roman d'Eneas*, of Chrétien de Troyes’s *Cligès*, of the *Prophecies of Merlin*, and so on (see, e.g., Antonelli 1995). What must have been the impact of such literature on Frederick and his paladins, and what mental dream space it generated in such minds: this is a topic for adventurous mapmakers.

One fascinating aspect of this research is the question of the map as text and as mental representation. In other words, what geographic and geostrategic ideas of their world did these men have? The astrological map of the sky was probably more accurate than their idea of the earth, for the former lay spread out before their eyes, whereas the latter could not. A case in
point is the twelfth-century *Tabula Rogieriana*, perhaps the most advanced medieval geographical map, commissioned by King Roger II, Frederick's maternal grandfather, from the Almoravid geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi in Palermo. The maps present themselves with the south up and the north down, and if the general outlines are recognizable, albeit at the price of some serious efforts, the overall image is very different from modern representations of the world. This has to be borne in mind throughout this attempt to figure out the space in which people, texts, and ideas circulated in the thirteenth-century Sicilian Regno.

The side of the question that has been most often studied so far is probably what concerns the translations of philosophical texts, principally the works of Maimonides and Averroes, as well as the productions of the court philosophers Michael Scot and Theodore of Antioch. The translations from the Greek were done in the twelfth century, chiefly under the impetus of William II "the Good," whereas in Frederick II's time the emphasis was put rather on the translations from the Arabic. Scot brought from Toledo his translations of al-Bitrugi's *On the Spheres*, and of Aristotle's *On Animals*, *De cælo*, and *De anima* with the Commentaries of Averroes, of which the only knowledge we have to this day is through Scot's Latin translation, with all its errors (see Libera 1998). He made a précis of Avicenna's *De animalibus* and produced a number of texts for Frederic, chiefly on astrology, physiognomy, and necromancy. The Emperor left for Jerusalem in 1228 with a treatise on the hygiene of a crusading army by Adam of Cremona. Another text on hygiene, partly derived from the pseudo-Aristotle, was later written by Theodore of Antioch, who maintained an abundant correspondence particularly with the East and is especially remembered as the translator of the *Moamyn*. Leonardo Fibonacci's texts *Abacus*, *Flos*, and *Liber quartorum* were revised and improved by their author for the Emperor and on the occasion of debates on their theses. Maimonide's *Guide for the Perplexed* may have been translated into Latin by Anatoli and Scot sometime in the period. In Naples, Anatoli finished his translation of Averroes' commentaries of Aristotle's *Logic*, and translated principally a *Compendium on Astronomy* by Averroes, of which neither the original in Arabic nor his translation has survived, Ptolemy's *Almagest*, Alfarganus' (Al-Farghani's) *Elements of Astronomy*, and Alpharabius' (al-Farabi's) *Brief Treatise on the Syllogism* into Hebrew.

## Past and Present

The Kingdom of Sicily in the reign of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen was a particularly propitious and fecund place and time, or chronotope (Bakhtin [1981] 2011), for the production, translation, and dissemination of texts, or literature in the broader sense of the term. The allusion to Bakhtin also serves to underline that this was a geographical place and a historical time of accelerated dialogism of several cultures and of several literary genres that in the long run resulted in deep civilizational changes. This can be explained by the historical political conflicts between diverging ideologies or visions of the world, concomitant with geographical tensions, on an east-west axis insofar as these were still the consequences of the
expansion of Islam in the previous centuries, and on a north-south axis insofar as the conquest of Sicily by the Norman Hauteville dynasty, and its subsequent union with the German Hohenstaufen family changed the geostrategic balance, as the reunion of Italy and Germany, by encircling the Papal States, threatened to overwhelm the papacy, all the more so when Frederick II started energetically developing and alternative imperial ideology.

These cultural transformations were accompanied by migrations of populations. In Trinacria, that is to say on the island of Sicily, the western and southern parts of the island was reclaimed from Arab pirates in the 1220s, which led to the foundation of the city of Lucera, in Apulia, where the Muslims who had not fled to North Africa were transported, in a ghetto of sorts where they were allowed to freely practice their religion, with mosque cathedral and Quranic school, under the protection of the Emperor to whom they paid taxes. They played an important part in the reign, because of their industriousness, and because they provided the emperor with faithful military troops in his conflict with the papacy. At the same time, from the protectorate he had reestablished and extended on Jerba in Tunisia, Frederick invited the Jews of the Maghreb to come and exert their talents in Sicily and South Italy, especially in the production of dates and indigo, granting the monopoly of the production of silk to the Jews of Trani. More generally, the 1231 Constitutions of Melfi established the right for Jews and Muslims to initiate lawsuits, because “we do not wish them to be persecuted in their innocence simply because they are Jews or Saracens” (Stürner 1996, 170–171). In 1236, in the German town of Fulda, Frederick instructed a trial to clear the Jews of the accusation of ritual murder of Christian children, demonstrating the insanity of the accusation, not hesitating to quote the Talmud, which the papacy placed on the index and which King Louis IX of France, Saint Louis, burned in Paris four years later, whereas the Jews of the Empire were henceforth placed under the direct protection of the Emperor as servants of his households (“servi camere nostre”).

This helps us to understand how the personage of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen was considered over the centuries as having set the ideal of a most desirable political organization, based on a philosophical idea of justice, and ideally freed from religious intransigence. Frederick deliberately elaborated an intellectual superstructure independent from religious doctrines, challenging the papacy not only in its temporal but also in its spiritual power. That is why the figure of Emperor Frederick II functions as a myth, that is to say a seminal text, in what T. S. Eliot called “the mind of Europe” to this day. As model philosopher prince and hero of the struggle against papal hegemony, Frederick has appeared to many as a precursor of Protestantism and of the Enlightenment. Denounced as Antichrist by his Guelf enemies, Frederick is just this figure of human emancipation in Nietzsche’s philosophy. But at this juncture there is clearly an ambiguity of the historical figure of Kaiser Friedrich II. As free spirit, as Nietzschean *Freigeist* and *Genie*, he is a liberating figure, but, as conscious reincarnation of the Roman Caesars, as Imperator, he is also a figure of the European Dictator. That ambiguity enters for a large part in the reasons why he encountered the radical enmity of the Church. Be it as it may, Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, no longer as human individual, but as mythical text,
as personification of the cultural and intellectual impact of his reign in the history of ideas in Europe, retains our attention because of the ambivalence, but more than that the continuing disagreement in the reception of the conceptual personage over the centuries.

This tension in the reception of the Frederician moment in history—embodied by a historical figure that illustrates Barthes’s notion of the turnstile of myth: modern-medieval, Christian-Antichristian, Neo-Guelf-Neo-Ghibelline, and so on—this textual machine, this vortex of sorts that the name of this Emperor immediately evokes, is most certainly the crucial issue of an investigation of its relevance today. For modern Europe is still struggling against forces of entropy and negentropy, seeking ways of putting an end to religious and ideological intransigence, paradoxically discovering new forms of alienation in promises of liberation, or even sometimes contemplating the vertiginous possibility of anti-intellectual regression, including a deleterious attachment to this binary thinking that is the root of war, or a neo-obscurantism that would cancel the open-minded dedication to the humanities in Europe that Frederick so strongly fostered, by a ceaseless dialogue and correspondence with the otherness of others.

LGIS

The literary science that will result from this principle of a geocriticism extended to diction (nonfiction) and using ad hoc DH tools will necessarily be discontinuous, jumping from one plane of immanence (see Deleuze and Guattari 1991) to another. It will also produce a dynamic perception of these literary landscapes that the traditional, static plates of paper atlases can hardly render. Therefore, the results of such research will be best published in digital form, which demands the development of appropriate digital tools and methods to show the diachronic evolutions of literary works in geographical spaces and of mindscapes and physical landscapes as literature-modified texts.

Much of historical research can benefit from analyses that consider space as a relevant variable. The production of maps with the help of the free and open-source GIS (Geographic Information System) software QGIS (formerly Quantum GIS) can be used and developed to serve as an efficient cartographic means of expression. In digital humanities today, there is a growing interest in HGIS (Historical Geographic Information Systems), addressed separately by diverse disciplinary areas, including engineering.

The phenomenon of “big data” and data science are broad terms to designate a large number of applications, all with an essentially inductive approach, among which the idea that it is applicable to the humanities in general, and to literary science in particular, since the mathematical and statistical tools would look for the most diverse associations between the elements of information available in a data set. Therefore, the aim is here to develop a specific digital tool for the study of literature in the wider sense, that is to say an LGIS (Literary Geographic Information System), which would enable us to visualize dynamic maps of the movement of the literary polysystems (see, e.g., Even-Zohar 1997).
Attention will be more particularly paid to the “geographical gaze” as fundamental for LGIS. The “geographical gaze” is the spatialization of phenomena. It is not their simple localization, but their contextualization in relation to other phenomena of identical or of different natures. The geographical gaze translates what is raw data into spatial pictures; that is, it enables an awareness of the territoriality of the object under study. But the most conspicuous specificity of LGIS will not only be a mapping of fictional and ideological data, of the geographical migrations and transformations of literary characters and forms as well as or philosophical and scientific ideas, but also a conjugation of the geographical evolutions of both “imaginary” and “real” facts.

As for the structure of LGIS, what matters is not how techniques and ideas are used and implemented at the same time, but to give a sense of flow to the geographical gaze. A map must show what remains hidden in mere collections of data. The use of such maps allows us to think spatially of themes that are not necessarily geographical, emerging from a more classic approach of the conceptualization of the cartographic output. The “geographical” element cannot therefore be simply reduced to the simple Euclidean space, translated into scales and projections, but its “geographical” characteristics should be the constant in LGIS-based research.

An LGIS (Literary Geographic Information System) can view, store, and analyze literary data from both text and context, basis and superstructure, and manifest their changes over time. The digitization and georeferencing of old maps are important because this will perpetuate these documents online, but also because, by adding coordinates to such maps, these can be added as a functional layer to modern GIS data, which facilitates the comparison of different map levels that show geography at different times. Maps can be further improved by techniques that warp data spatially to fit more accurate into modern maps. But here too the LGIS specificity will extend to mindscapes, that is to say both fictional worlds and dated mental representations of the surface of the earth (i.e., al-Idrissi's *Tabula Rogieriana*).

Moreover, these methods are transferable to studies of the production, translation, dissemination, and reception of literary texts in the wider sense (including philosophical, scientific, legal, or diplomatic productions), which would be likely to provide groundbreaking information for literary science and the history of ideas. Conceived and so named over fifty years ago, the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) allow us to organize, harmonize, and process a wide and diverse range of quantitative, qualitative, and spatial data, and to produce dynamic cartography and digital models, as well as simulations and scenarios, to support spatial and multitemporal planning and analysis. The continuous innovative aspects at the functional level, the close synergy with the web and cloud systems, and the possibilities to use and associate 2D, 3D, and 4D models have made these applications of geographical matrix an ideal connection between various disciplines of knowledge, creating shared output products, thanks to geoinformatic methods of investigation.

Precisely the landscape, which offers countless possibilities for comparison, combining the subjective-perceptive dimension with the scientific-objective one, constitutes, in geocriticism as a field of research in literary science, a perfect meeting ground on which to
operate a series of highly proactive considerations. Literary works also emotionally stimulate
the cognitive approach to the events-related places, giving life to the landscapes, cultures, and
traditions preserved, arousing a further rational and scientific reading on a geographical-
cartographic plane, to mitigate the subjective component and enrich the whole discussion
with objective information and data.

This allows for activating an integrated analysis process, in which the geographical
examination is enriched with literary descriptions that bring out peculiarities, generate
emotions and stimulate the imagination, add elements and meanings on memory, on the
soul of the places, as well as on concrete relationships, which are the substrate in which the
cultural roots are implanted. But, conversely, the geographical elaboration and cartographic
translation of data are bound to stimulate new literary and historiographical reflections
generated by the phenomenalization of data, and correlations of data that had hitherto
remained abstract or disseminated in a diversity of sources.

Then, the analysis of the changes detected through the changes in time, through the
comparison between descriptions, photographs, and cartographs of different eras, helps to
reconstruct the essential stages that during the studied period have marked the evolutionary
phase, identifying the essential characteristics, the changes, and the dynamics that have
helped to outline the current configuration of the landscape under consideration.

The creation of geodatabases in the GIS environment, where the data, images, and
information layers obtained from multiple sources, in the dual perspective—geospatial and
multitemporal—serves to define digital cartography and multimedia products, decisive for
the analysis and delivery of the results achieved. The construction and comparison of ground
maps with different dates, with appropriate precautions, allow us to contextualize and
quantify the categories of use and the types of infrastructure, assessing the extent of the
changes that have occurred and mapping the characteristics of the landscapes described.

The spaces and places present in the literature of the time can be georeferenced and, therefore,
analyzed in a dynamic and integrated perspective, in which the geographical, cartographic, and
historical components are processed to generate a product made of intersectoral knowledge, in
which both the qualitative and the quantitative dimensions are linked together to bring out the
elements of the different places. In collaborative research, where geodatabases and tools are used
in the GIS environment, historical and literary descriptions become a relevant tool to investigate
a historical period and identify elements that remain or have changed over time.

The reconstruction and reinterpretation of journeys and migrations of people, trade
routes, and cultural transferences of various kinds are other benefits that can be derived from
the implementation of the use of GIS in literary and historical research related to the use of
appropriate spatial analysis (Cost-Surface Analysis—CSA; Least-Cost-Path Analysis—LCP).

The most important aspect of the use of GIS is connected with the latest forms of
geotechnical and multimedia restitution of data, sources, and collated documentary
materials, and the results achieved with their studies, especially if interdisciplinary, in synergy
between literature, geography, history, and other disciplines of the humanities, in cooperation with scientific disciplinary areas belonging to programming and processing of algorithms and automated procedures, such as computer science and engineering.

Concretely, GIS software like QGIS enables what could be described as translations into geographical maps of series of data collected under the form of spreadsheets (like Excel, Calc, etc.). The addition of the temporal dimension to the “slice-of-time” representations of paper atlases at a given moment demands a technical upgrading from static to dynamic maps, which can only be displayed on digital media. This evolution is obviously crucial for an efficient adaptation of QGIS or other GIS programs to history, literature, and other disciplines for which the time factor is of primary importance.

The visualization in map form of the evolution of space in time—that is to say of space-time continuums or chronotopes, and the translation of the contents of spreadsheet-style databases, by producing graphic representations of data that would otherwise remain encrypted in coded archives—will produce a form of data mining that is expected to retroact on the research discourses and to produce new advancements of knowledge in disciplines of the humanities like historiography, or literary science, that will have provided a great part of the data in the first place.

**Al Acknowledgment**

The authors declare that generative AI or AI-assisted technologies were not used in any way to prepare, write, or complete essential authoring tasks in this manuscript.

**Conflict of Interest**

The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.

**REFERENCES**

Abulafia, David. 1992. *Frederick II: A Medieval Emperor*. New York: Oxford University Press.

Amari, Michele, ed. 1857. *Biblioteca arabo-sicula, ossia Raccolta di testi arabici che toccano la geografia, la storia, le biografie e la bibliografia della Sicilia* [Arabic-Sicilian Library, or Collection of Texts in Arabic relative to the Geography, History, Biographies, and Bibliography of Sicily]. 2 vols. Lipsia (Leipzig), Germany: F. A. Brockhaus.

Antonelli, Roberto. 1995. "La corte 'italiana' di Federico II e la letteratura europea" [Frederick II's 'Italian' Court and European Literature]. In *Federico II e le nuove culture: atti del XXXI Convegno storico internazionale* [Frederick II and the New Culture: Acts of the XXXI International History Conference], 319-345. Spoleto, Italy: Centro italiano di studi sull'alto medioevo.

Asor Rosa, Alberto, ed. 1983. *Letteratura italiana. Storia e geografia* [Italian Literature. History and Geography], vol. 2. Torino, Italy: Einaudi.

Asor Rosa, Alberto. ed. 1986. *Letteratura italiana. Storia e Geografia* [Italian Literature. History and Geography], vol. 1. Torino, Italy: Einaudi.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. (1981) 2011. "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel." In *The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays*, translated by Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson, 84–258. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Braudel, Fernand. 1958. "Histoire et Sciences sociales: La longue durée" [History and Social Sciences: The Long Duration]. *Annales* 13 (4): 725-753. https://doi.org/10.3406/ahess.1958.2781.

Braudel, Fernand. 1972. *The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II*, translated by Siân Reynolds. New York: Harper and Row.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1991. "Le Plan d'immanence" [The Plane of Immanence]. In *Qu'est-ce que la philosophie?* [What Is Philosophy?], 38-59. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit.

Delle Donne, Fulvio. 2019. *La porta del sapere. Cultura alla corte di Federico II di Svevia* [The Door of Knowledge. Culture at the Court of Frederick II of Swabia]. Roma: Carocci.

De Renzi, Salvatore. 1857. *Storia documentata della Scuola medica di Salerno* [Documented History of the School of Medicine of Salerno]. Napoli, Italy: Gaetano Nobile.

Dionisotti, Carlo. (1967) 1999. *Geografia e storia della letteratura italiana* [Geography and History of Italian Literature]. Torino, Italy: Einaudi.

Even-Zohar, Itamar. 1997. "Factors and Dependencies in Culture: A Revised Outline for Polysystem Culture Research." *Canadian Review of Comparative Literature* XXIV (1): 15-34.

Frederick, Holy Roman Emperor, II. 1943. *The Art of Falconry, Being the De Arte Venandi Cum Avibus of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen*, translated by Casey A. Wood and F. Marjorie Fyfe. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Genette, Gérard. 1993. *Fiction and Diction*, translated by Catherine Porter. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Green, Monica H. 2001. *The Trotula: A Medieval Compendium of Women's Medicine*. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Huillard-Bréholles, Jean Louis Alphonse. 1865. *Vie et correspondance de Pierre de La Vigne ministre de l'empereur Frédéric II. Avec une étude sur le mouvement réformiste au XIIIe siècle* [Life and Correspondence of Pietro della Vigna, Minister of Emperor Frederick II. With a Study on the Reformist Movement of the Thirteenth Century]. Paris: Henri Plon.

Huillard-Bréholles, Jean Louis Alphonse, and Honoré d'Albert Luynes, eds. 1852. *Historia diplomatica Friderici Secundi; sive constitutiones, privilegia, mandata, instrumenta quae supersunt istius imperatoris et filiorum ejus. Accedunt epistolae paparum et documenta varia* [Diplomatic History of Frederick II; or Constitutions, Privileges, Mandates, and Instruments Remaining from this Emperor and his Sons, with Letters of the Popes and Various Documents], 12 vols. Paris: Plon Brothers.

Kantorowicz, Ernst Hartwig. 1931. *Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite* [Emperor Frederick II]. Berlin: G. Bondi.
Koch, Walter, Klaus Höflinger, Joachim Spiegel, Christian Friedl, and Katharina Gutermuth, eds. 2017. *Die Urkunden der Deutschen Könige und Kaiser. Die Urkunden Friedrichs II. 1222–1226* [Documents of the German Kings and Emperors. The Documents of Frederick II. 1222–1226], vol. 14–15 Register. Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz Verlag.

Libera, Alain de. 1998. "Introduction." In *L'intelligence et la pensée: grand commentaire du De anima, Livre III (429a10-435b25)* [The Intelligence of Thought: Great Commentary of the De Anima, Book III (429a10-435b25)], by Averroes, translated by Alain de Libera, 7-45. Paris: Flammarion.

Luard, Henry Richards. 1876. *Matthæi Parisiensis, Monachi Sancti Albani, Chronica Majora* [Principal Chronicle of Matthew Paris, Monk of Saint Alban], vol. III. London: Longman.

Moretti, Franco. 1998. *Atlas of the European Novel: 1800–1900*. London: Verso.

Moretti, Franco. 2005. *Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History*. London: Verso.

Moretti, Franco. 2013. *Distant Reading*. London: Verso.

Muratori, Lodovico Antonio, ed. 1936. *Rerum italicarum scriptores: raccolta degli storici italiani dal cinquecento al millecinquecento* [Writers on Italic Matters: Collection of Texts by Italian Historians from the Sixth to the Sixteenth Centuries], 2nd ed, vol. 7-2. Bologna, Italy: Nicola Zanichelli.

Pertz, Georgius Heinricus, ed. 1864. *Ryccardi de sancto germano notarii chronica* [Richard of San Germano's Chronicle]. Hannover, Germany: Impensis Bibliopolii Hahniani.

Petrucci, Armando. 1983. "Il libro manoscritto" [The Handwritten Book]. In *Letteratura italiana. Storia e geografia* [Italian Literature. History and Geography], vol. 2, edited by Alberto Asor Rosa, 497-524. Torino, Italy: Einaudi.

Scurr, Ruth. 2015. *John Aubrey: My Own Life*. London: Vintage.

Stendhal [Henri Beyle]. 1933. "À M. de Balzac, Civita-Vecchia, 16 octobre 1840" [To M. de Balzac, Civita-Vecchia, 16 October 1840]. In *Correspondance (1836-1842)*, edited by Henri Martineau, X:267-288. Paris: Le Divan.

Stone, Lawrence. 1971. "Prosopography." *Daedalus* 100 (1): 46-79.

Stürner, Wolfgang, ed. 1996. *Die Konstitutionen Friedrichs II. Für das Königreich Sizilien. Constitutiones et acta publica imperatorum et regum* [The Constitutions of Frederick II for the Kingdom of Sicily. Constitutions and Public Acts of the Emperors and Kings], vol. II supplement, Hannover, Germany: Hahnshe Buchhandlung.

Weiland, Ludewicus, ed. 1846. *Constitutiones et acta publica imperatorum et regum (1198-1202)* [MGH] [Constitutions and Public Acts of the Emperors and Kings (1198-1202)], vol. 2. Hannover: Impensis Bibliopolii Hahniani.

Westphal, Bertrand. 2007. *La Géocritique: réel, fiction, espace* [Geocriticism: Real, Fiction, Space]. Paris: Les éditions de Minuit.

Westphal, Bertrand. 2011. *Le monde plausible: espace, lieu, carte* [The Plausible World: Space, Place, Map]. Paris: Les éditions de Minuit.
## ABOUT THE AUTHORS

**Valerio Manzari** is a freelance engineer and a tenured professor of mathematics and physics at the Liceo Scientifico "Severi" in Frosinone. He holds a PhD in "Methods, Models and Technologies for Engineering" of the XXXIV Cycle at UNICLAM Cassino-Department of Civil and Mechanical Engineering. As an engineer, he has carried out some eighty-six projects for which he had been commissioned, with budgets of up to 5,000,000,000 euros. As an academic, he is the author of fifteen articles in geomatics (i.e., geographic information). He is also a computer programmer with advanced knowledge and mastery of structural calculation software, geotechnics, finite element mathematical solvers, accountancy, and Building Information Modelling (BIM), analysis and processing of input and output data; Computer Assisted Drawing (CAD) programs, survey and drawing programs; computer programs for the study and application of mathematics and physics. He is involved as research engineer and digital humanities computer science expert in Francesca Manzari's research project "Atlas of Intellectual Migrations in the Mediterranean of the 13th Century" (AIMM13).

Corresponding Author's Email: valerio.manzari@unicas.it

**Joanny Moulin** is a full professor of English literature and philosophy at Aix-Marseille University, honorary member of the Institut Universitaire de France (senior member 2017-2022), and president of the Biostudies Society. He is the author of eight academic monographs (on Ted Hughes, Derek Walcott, W. B. Yeats, Robert Burns, Louis MacNeice), six biographies (Ted Hughes, Charles Darwin, Elizabeth I, Victoria, Elizabeth II), and more than eighty articles and translations, and he is the scientific editor of sixteen volumes of articles. His latest works is a monograph on the theory of biography entitled *On Biography, Critical Essays* (2021). His fields of specialization range from modern poetry and the history of literature to the philosophy of deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and the practice and philosophy of history. He is currently writing a monograph on *The Many Lives of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen*, and as such, he is very active in Francesca Manzari's research project "Atlas of Intellectual Migrations in the Mediterranean of the 13th Century" (AIMM13).

Email: joanny.moulin@univ-amu.fr

**Francesca Manzari** is a full professor of comparative literature at Aix-Marseille University, where she is head of the master of literary translation. She has been heading the Master Literature and Psychoanalysis (LIPS) Program from 2018 to 2024. She is the author of *Écriture derridienne: entre langage des rêves et critique littéraire* (Peter Lang 2009) and of *Traduire la Canzone; Cavalcanti selon C. T. Brooks, Pound and Zukofsky* (Honoré Champion 2025). She is a specialist of romance languages literatures (Italian, French, Occitan, medieval Tuscan), and more specifically of the troubadours and the translations of their works into modern languages (Italian, French, and English). Her main fields of expertise are French theory (Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari), medieval modernities in poetry from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries, and traductology and theories of translation (Benjamin, Berman, Derrida). She is head of research project "Atlas of Intellectual Migrations in the Mediterranean of the 13th Century" (AIMM13).

Email: francesca.manzari@univ-amu.fr