Linguistic purism, the attempt to protect language against the ‘threat’ of multilingualism, change and outside contact, finds an antecedent in Greek Antiquity that remains mostly unknown outside Classics and has never been studied in a multidisciplinary perspective. PURA aims to overturn this state of affairs by producing the first global study of Greek purism, the texts which upheld it, and their legacy in later ages. The focus of this analysis are Atticist lexica: collections of features to be cultivated or avoided in correct Greek. These texts were compiled by scholars who lived in the multilingual Roman Empire and wished to counter the natural evolution of Greek by freezing it at an ideal stage of purity, identified with the extinct dialect of 5th-century Athens. PURA is characterized by a multidisciplinary methodology combining Classics, linguistics, textual philology, codicology and historical lexicography which will tackle both the immaterial heritage of Atticist theories and their material history as books. Its objectives are: 1) to provide a global mapping of the purist theories expressed in the lexica and make them both accessible outside the traditional format of critical editions and approachable for non-experts in the form of a unique web-based searchable corpus; 2) to endow the corpus with an in-depth linguistic analysis that extends from Ancient to Modern Greek; 3) to bring textual transmission and book circulation into the picture by charting all the manuscripts and first printed editions of the lexica; 4) to produce the definitive study of Atticism and its legacy from a modern linguistic and philological perspective. PURA will go beyond the traditional standards of Classical studies by creating a model of textual, linguistic and philological analysis for the investigation of Ancient Greek lexicography that can be extended to the study of purism in other languages and cultures.

The aim of this project is to rewrite the history of differential and integral calculus in 18th century Europe focusing on the processes of acquisition and circulation of teaching and learning practices and, on a broader level, to elaborate a new adaptable methodological framework integrating history of mathematics and mathematical education, oral and cultural histories in order to reconstruct the function of oral knowledge in the processes of acquiring mathematical knowledge acting in determined institutional and social contexts. In doing so, LEGITIMATH will address an under researched phase in the history of mathematics by choosing to explore a rich teaching corpus produced by several learned communities in the Italian peninsula, and chart the transnational circulation of Maria Gaetana Agnesi’s "Istituzioni Analitiche" (1748) as well as its reception outside Italy and its French and English translations. The project is interdisciplinary, crossing history of philosophy and of mathematics, mathematics education and the oral culture of knowledge, and is groundbreaking insofar as it prioritizes oral discourses and practices over internalist studies of mathematical works, and, by examining the case of Italy, it will reassess the relation between scientific “centres” and “peripheries” from the perspective of the circulation of teaching practices. This project, hosted at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, will be pivotal for my career as it will allow me, thanks to the help of my supervisor and the special training offered by my host institutions, to strenghten my expertise as a researcher and create a permanent international network integrating historical studies of mathematics to history of science and philosophy. The project is a fundamental step for me to eventually apply for an ERC grant, and subsequently obtain a permanent research position at Ca’Foscari or in another European or Italian institution.