University of Vienna (Austria)

section icon

Sharing Ancient Wisdoms (SAWS)

Posted by Paul Spence on February 25, 2015

The aim of the project is to use new technology to present and analyse the tradition of wisdom literatures in Greek and Arabic. Throughout antiquity and the middle ages collections of wise or useful sayings were created and circulated, as a practical response to the cost and inaccessibility of full texts in a manuscript age; the project will focus on those which collected moral and social advice. The compilation of these collections formed a crucial route by which ideas of reasonable behaviour and good conduct were disseminated over a huge area, and over many centuries.