Written sources about Africa and their study - Le fonti scritte sull'Africa e i loro studi

Even though contemporary research on African languages and cultures is usually based on oral and audiovisual data obtained from fieldwork, a vast and irreplaceable repository of knowledge about this continent is contained in written sources involving all sorts of texts. The present volume is dedicated to the study of written sources about Africa and aims at bringing together various disciplines. The research results presented here take into account the specific features of the texts examined regarding both form and content, along with the different historical periods in which the texts have been produced (i.e. antiquity, medieval, modern and contemporary period) and the diverse geographic areas to which the texts relate, which are North Africa, including Egypt and the Sahara, East Africa and West Africa. In doing so, the findings of these studies could benefit diverse scientific domains working on Africa, and particularly those of humanities and social sciences.