Rediscovering Kleve’s Archive

One of the core activities of the LACUNA project is the recovery, HTR digitization, and dissemination of the unpublished documents of the Norwegian philologist Knut Kleve, one of the leading classicists of last decades who made a fundamental contribution to modern research on the Herculaneum papyri and Epicurean theology. Donated by his family in 2017, this private archive is preserved at the National Library of Norway in Oslo and contains heterogeneous materials: publications, handwritten notes (mostly in Norwegian), draft editions, correspondence with other scholars, hundreds of negatives, photographs and drawings of papyri, and related bibliography. Among the most significant materials for the project are those documenting Knut Kleve’s long-term work on Philodemus’ theological papyri, including preparatory texts and unpublished writings on Epicurean theology.

The working methodology includes the complete high-resolution digitization of the archive, the automated transcription of selected materials, and the preparation for publication of his unpublished monograph Physis theon. For transcription, the project will use the software Transkribus, with Super Models capable of handling multilingual and mixed-format archival materials, including handwritten and typewritten texts in Norwegian, German, Italian, Greek, and Latin.

The aim is to make Kleve’s unpublished documents accessible, searchable, and reusable: preserving an exceptional scholarly legacy and transforming it into a research resource for future studies on the Herculaneum papyri and Epicurean philosophy.