L'Année philologique

L'Année philologique ( APh for short ), also Marouzeau (after its founder, the Latinist Jules Marouzeau ), is the most important and most comprehensive bibliography in the field of classical studies .

History of the work

The Année philologique was launched in 1924 and appeared in a first volume in 1928, which covered the years 1924 to 1926. The bibliography includes books and specialist articles dealing with the history and culture of the Mediterranean region from the early period (2nd millennium BC) to around the year 800 AD. The central themes are ancient Greece and the Roman Empire .

After a period of two years was recorded in the first volume, all subsequent volumes record the literature for a calendar year. After Marouzeau's death in 1964, Juliette Ernst, who worked for many years, became the editor. In 1965 she founded a first branch for evaluation at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill , a second in Heidelberg in 1972 , and since 2013 at the University of Munich . In 1977 a third office was opened in Lausanne , others followed in 1996 in Genoa and 1999 in Granada . The publishing body is the Société Internationale de Bibliographie Classique . It is supported by the Center National de la Recherche Scientifique in France, the University of Cincinnati , the National Endowment for the Humanities in the USA, the American Philological Association , the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences , the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences , the Faculty of Literature and Philosophy of the University of Genoa , the Centro di Servizi Bibliotecari di Lettere e Filosofia , the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche in Rome, the University of Granada , the Fédération Internationale des Associations d'Études Classiques and UNESCO . The current editor and successor to Ernst is Pierre-Paul Corsetti, who is also the head of the French branch. Lisa D. Carson is the head of the Cincinnati branch, Ernst A. Schmidt of the Heidelberg branch , Franco Montanari in Genoa and Pedro Pablo Fuentes González in Granada.

Structure and content

The structure of the Année philologique is divided into two parts. The first part consists of the topic of ancient authors and texts , the second part of topics and disciplines . The volumes are indexed through thematic indices for ancient names, modern names and authors. Since volume 42 (1971), a geographical index has also been offered, which was temporarily abandoned (volumes 57 and 58, 1986 and 1987).

There are currently around 12,500 new entries annually. To this end, 1,500 journals and edited volumes (such as meeting reports, colloquia volumes, commemorative publications ) are evaluated. An abstract is offered for many articles . To monographs will review information given. The Marouzeau also evaluates small and little-circulated magazines and is therefore an important aid in opening up ancient literature. After a database was published on CD-ROM in 1995 with the content of the years 1976 to 1987 ( Database of Classical Bibliography ), there has been the possibility of paid access to the database via the Internet since the late 1990s. As of August 2017, the data from 1924 to 2015 is available.

The list of abbreviations of the evaluated journals that precedes the APh is important and now almost universally recognized in research. The problem with the Marouzeau is the delay in reporting, which now amounts to several years: Due to the large number of publications on antiquity, which continues to grow, the editors are no longer able to maintain the period between the publication of the volumes and their reporting periods, which used to be usually two years. Therefore it has become common practice in research to bridge this period with the quarterly, very up-to-date bibliographical information in the journal Gnomon . However, the Gnomon does not evaluate magazines in a comparably large amount and does not provide any further information.

Previous works

The periods before the publication of the first volume are recorded in other bibliographies:

until about 1700 in Johann Albert Fabricius : Bibliotheca graeca , Bibliotheca latina and Bibliotheca latina mediae et infimae aetatis
1700 to 1878 in Wilhelm Engelmann , Emil Preuss: Bibliotheca scriptorum classicorum , 2 volumes, 8th edition, Leipzig 1880–1882
1878 to 1896 in Rudolf Klussmann : Bibliotheca scriptorum classicorum et Graecorum et Latinorum , 2 volumes, Leipzig 1909–1913
1896 to 1914 in Scarlat Lambrino : Bibliographie de l'antiquité classique 1896 - 1914 (only volume 1: Auteurs et textes published), Paris 1951
1914 to 1924 in Jules Marouzeau: Dix années de bibliographie classique , Paris 1927–1928

Web links

Individual evidence

↑ Description of how this branch worked in the early 1990s .
↑ A critical view of content indexing in the APh: Jeanine Williamson: Inferring about classics retrieval from a disciplinary bibliography. Analyzing the paper-medium form of L'Annee philologique . In: ASIS '95. Proceedings of the 58th ASIS Annual Meeting Chicago, Illinois, October 9-12, 1995 . Information Today, Medford, New Jersey 1995, pp. 45-48.

[1] Description of how this branch worked in the early 1990s .

[2] A critical view of content indexing in the APh: Jeanine Williamson: Inferring about classics retrieval from a disciplinary bibliography. Analyzing the paper-medium form of L'Annee philologique . In: ASIS '95. Proceedings of the 58th ASIS Annual Meeting Chicago, Illinois, October 9-12, 1995 . Information Today, Medford, New Jersey 1995, pp. 45-48.