An Interim Report on the Editorial and Analytical Work of the AnonymClassic Project

Abstract

In this collective article, members of the AnonymClassic project discuss various aspects of their work on the textual tradition Kalīla and Dimna. Beatrice Gruendler provides a general introduction to the questions being considered. This is followed by a number of short essays in specific areas, organized into three categories: codicology, literary history and theory, and the digital infrastructure of the project. Jan J. van Ginkel summarizes the challenges involved in editing the Syriac versions of Kalīla and Dimna; Rima Redwan explains the AnonymClassic team’s approach vis-à-vis the transcription and textual segmentation of Arabic manuscripts; Khouloud Khalfallah follows this with an overview of the types of data that are recorded for each codex that is integrated into the project; Beatrice Gruendler, in a second contribution, shares some preliminary results from the analysis of interrelationships among manuscripts; and Rima Redwan, also in a second contribution, discusses the sets of illustrations, or »image cycles«, that are found in many copies of Kalīla wa-Dimna. Moving into the realm of literary history and theory, Isabel Toral poses a range of questions relating to the status of Kalīla and Dimna, as (arguably) anonymous in authorship and as a fundamentally translated book; Johannes Stephan explores the references to Kalīla wa-Dimna found in various medieval Arabic scholarly works; and Matthew L. Keegan confronts the problem of the genre(s) to which Kalīla wa-Dimna might be assigned and the exceptional »promiscuity« of the text. The last section of the article, on digital infrastructure, contains two contributions: Theodore S. Beers describes a web application that the team has created to facilitate the consultation of published versions of Kalīla and Dimna, and, finally, Mahmoud Kozae and Marwa M. Ahmed offer a more comprehensive discussion of the digital tools and methods – specialized and in some cases developed »in-house« – on which the AnonymClassic project relies.