OXYMORAL PI Conducts Research in Cividale del Friuli
As part of the OXYMORAL project (Inverted Morality: Reversed Semantics in Old Church Slavic Moral Words), the project’s Principal Investigator, Prof. Diweg-Pukanec, carried out a research stay at the National Archaeological Museum (Museo Archeologico Nazionale) in Cividale del Friuli, Italy.
The visit focused on the study of Slavic personal names from the 8th and 9th centuries preserved in the remarkable Cividale Gospel, a sixth-century manuscript of exceptional historical significance. Many of these names belonged to Slavic pilgrims, making the manuscript a unique source for the study of early Slavic Christian communities. Working directly with the original source material, the research verified and documented key anthroponymic records that provide valuable evidence for investigating the genealogy of morality and the historical semantics of Slavic moral vocabulary.
Particular attention was devoted to the Slavic root dobr-, whose semantic development sheds new light on the evolution of concepts associated with goodness, bravery, and noble status in early Slavic culture. The analysis confirmed several historically attested name forms, including Dobrodei, Dabramusclo, Dobrosisne, Dabraua, and Doblisclaug, contributing new insights into the semantics of early Slavic anthroponymy.
The findings will be incorporated into the final OXYMORAL monograph and presented at the 21st Slovak Onomastic Conference in August 2026 in the paper On the Semantics of Slavic dobr- in the Multilingual Onomastic Dataset of the Cividale Gospel. The research also supports the follow-up international project Cross-lingual Information Retrieval for Scientific Datasets in Less-Resourced Languages (CHIST-ERA), which builds on the outcomes of OXYMORAL.
The stay also strengthened international collaboration. Dr. Alessandra Negri of the National Archaeological Museum generously provided specialist literature on the history of the Cividale Gospel, including a volume that has been added to the library of the Semantic Laboratory, another important outcome of the OXYMORAL project.
During the visit, the PI stayed at the historic Monastery of Castelmonte (Santuario di Castelmonte), one of the oldest pilgrimage sanctuaries in northeastern Italy. With a documented history extending back to at least the eighth century, the monastery provided an inspiring setting for research centred on the cultural and linguistic heritage of the early medieval Slavic world.
Galéria
