Research Project Spotlight: Dr Valentina Arena

Hello! Tell us a bit about your research project. 

Ordering, Constructing, Empowering: Fragments of the Roman Republican Antiquarians (FRRAnt) will establish a new framework for the elaboration of knowledge and the establishment of the religious and institutional context in the Republic. It will do so by making available for the first time a synoptic view of Roman antiquarians from the Republican period who, writing in prose, laid out a new way of ordering knowledge, and in the process, described the world for their contemporaries as well as for us. 

These works, united by a family resemblance in the way they approach the past, tended to adopt a synchronic, rather than chronological, approach to narrative history writing, appeared at first sight to collect all evidence for a given phenomenon indiscriminately without explicitly evaluating its relevance to a particular problem and, by adopting a philological method, moved from the present to reconstruct the past. Their subject matters concentrate on political institutions and laws, religion, private life and customs, topography, and language. They constituted a knowledge transformation that re-shaped the Roman intellectual horizon and was understood until the 19th century as a distinctive ‘antiquarian’ moment. From that point on, scholarship has tended to divide this material in subfields of knowledge and obscure its deeper continuities. By drawing on a systematic analysis of this antiquarian material, the project will chart the dynamics of the intellectual, political, institutional, and religious spheres at the very moment of their creative mutual interdependence. 

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, philologically rigorous and historically transformative. Supplying this much needed edition with additional analytical insights in related volumes, FRRAnt’s ambition is to launch the study of these texts as a major new departure for the study of ancient world and of classical tradition from the Renaissance onwards. 

What was the inspiration/motivation behind the project?

While working on my next project on Roman constitutionalism, I turned to these antiquarian works as they deal with, amongst other things, the rules and regulations concerning the institutional working of Rome and its religious framework. Although they cast them in terms of continuity with the past, these texts contributed directly to the formulation and establishment of the Roman Republican ‘constitution.’ However, while working on them, I came to the realisation of the dire need for a work that collects this material in a critical and analytical manner, which alone can present the unity of the phenomenon. 

Without a full understanding of the development of this scholarly tradition, it will not be possible trace down the history of Republican ‘constitutionalism’, which currently plays a large role not only in the field of historical studies, but also in political contemporary theory. I, therefore, decided to try to rectify this situation and fill this gap. 

Who are the partners in the project? 

The project is based at UCL's History Department, under my leadership (there are no other institutional partners). However, the project team members come from various countries.

Who is funding the Project?

The ERC Consolidator Grant is funding this project. 

Further links

• Dr Valentina Arena 
• UCL History's news item on Dr Arena's ERC Grant Success
• European Research Council (ERC)
• ERC Consolidator Grants