UCL History's Dr Valentina Arena wins prestigious ERC Consolidator Grant project funding

This project aims at establishing a new framework for the elaboration of knowledge and the religious and institutional structures of the Roman Republic. It will do so through the first systematic and comprehensive account of a group of Republican writers, the antiquarians, who laid out a new way of ordering knowledge, and in the process, described the world for their contemporaries as well as for us.

The project will collect and make widely accessible a body of critically significant texts that have never been seen in their entirety and in the process will also transform our understanding of the intellectual life of the Roman Republic and fully explore its connections with the political and religious world of the time.

Bringing historical, linguistic, legal, religious, and philosophical expertise to bear on a close philological investigation of the source texts, we will produce the first ever edition of all the surviving antiquarian fragments of the Republic. Supplied with analytical insights in the commentary, introduction, and related monographs, FRRAnt’s ambition is to launch the study of these texts as a major new departure for the study of ancient world and of the classical tradition from the Renaissance onwards.

Congratulations again to Valentina on what will be a really important, and indeed a field-changing, programme of work.