The London Stage Database is the latest in a long line of projects that aim to capture and present the rich array of information available on the theatrical culture of London, from the reopening of the public playhouses following the English civil wars in 1660 to the end of the eighteenth century. On a given night, in each of the city’s playhouses, hundreds or even thousands of spectators gathered to experience richly varied performance events that included not only plays, but prologues and epilogues, short afterpieces and farces, pantomimes, instrumental music, singing, and dancing. These events, taken together, provide a wealth of information about the rhythms of public life and the texture of popular culture in long-eighteenth-century London.
The letters of William Herle, intelligencer and diplomat for the Elizabethan court, offer a unique resource for Early Modern studies. Written over the period 1559-88, William Herle’s previously unedited, unpublished, and overlooked letters are richly textured. They offer a fascinating insight into the information networks and patronage systems of the political administration, as well as valuable material for religious, social, economic and cultural history. This online edition of his letters has been designed as a hypertext archive in order to maximize the ability to access and retrieve information from the corpus.
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced scholars to rethink how we access unpublished archival sources and conduct research. It is our hope that PIDE will help connect researchers with the sources they need to complete their ongoing projects, especially in light of reduced research budgets, greater travel restrictions, and more limited access to Italian archives and libraries. It is also our hope that PIDE will help to sustain and grow an already vibrant scholarly community working to expand our understanding of premodern Italy.
The Hooke Folio Online is an edition of images and transcriptions of a long lost manuscript of the papers of Robert Hooke, returned to the archive of the Royal Society of London in May 2006. Robert Hooke was one of the key figures of the scientific revolution and this manuscript describes the working life of the very earliest days of the Royal Society.
A resource for book history and literary technologies that includes exhibits, course materials, and a bibliography. Exhibits include medieval manuscripts, an exhibit on medieval scribes and their tools, and Renaissance toxicology manuscripts.
Website and free geolocated walking tour audio app for iPhone and Android keyed to the social and cultural history of Florence designed for wide user base and age group. With the app, the user navigates Florence toggling between a modern and a superbly detailed sixteenth-century map. On the website, users can read about each guide and the places they go (‘Stories’), discover more about the project team (‘About’), and find out how the characters were designed (‘Blog’).
Guide characters are:
Cosimo: Master of Florence, 1459 First citizen or godfather? Cosimo de’ Medici takes you through the city he’s spent a lifetime trying to make his own.
Giovanni: Neighbourhood World/People and Politics, 1490 Discover local worlds and get a different perspective on the heart of Florence as Giovanni, a wool worker, walks you through a day in his life.
Niccolosa: Saints and Sinners, 1492 Explore Florence’s sacred foundations with Niccolosa Alessandri as the city faces an uncertain future after the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent.
Marietta: City of Women, 1561 Join Marietta as she traces her journey from the city orphanage to life as a silk weaver.
Ercole: Crime and Punishment, 1566 From the torture chamber to the gallows, Ercole shows you how justice was done in the Renaissance city.
The app and website have been written by an international team of researchers and is a collaboration between the universities of Exeter, Cambridge and Toronto, with project partners at the National Gallery (London), Polo Museale della Toscana and Firenze Patrimonio Mondiale (UNESCO).
HathiTrust is a partnership of academic and research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world. Users have the ability to search full-text books and read them online.
A complete electronic edition with full-text transcription and facsimile images of all 25,000 folios of the correspondence of Samuel Hartlib (c1600-62), a great seventeenth-century ‘intelligencer’ and man of science.
The Kit Marlowe Project is a digital space designed to introduce undergraduates with diverse majors to project-driven, research-based learning, and digital humanities practices in the context of studying one of Elizabethan England’s most compelling literary figures. As one of Shakespeare’s most famous contemporaries, Christopher Marlowe was a poet, playwright, and likely spy; his friends called him “Kit” and so do we. The site has been created so that students may curate an open-source collection of Marlowe’s works, contribute exhibits, encyclopedia, and bibliography entries, plus contribute to cultural preservation efforts by transcribing, encoding, and publishing archival works in an open-access forum. Excepting the About blogs, the Teaching Resources, the Contributor Resources, and the Mini-Archive documentation, all content has been student-generated.
The e-leo experiment stems from the very particular nature of the Biblioteca Leonardina collection, which possesses the entire published corpus of Leonardo da Vinci’s works, starting with the first edition of the Treatise on Painting of 1651, and ranging from the oldest editions to the most recent facsimile publications, including those of the national edition of Leonardo’s manuscripts and drawings. The archive contains almost the entire corpus of Leonardo’s work, relying on its collection of editions (from the first, dated 1651), and has set itself an even more ambitious goal, that of contextualizing them within the broader framework of Italian and European historical and scientific heritage. The data in the archive are texts and drawings, analysed and classified by means of indexing methods for drawing searches, semantic glossaries, and search filter tools: an apparatus proposing an integrated processing model for Renaissance manuscripts by artist-engineers. In parallel, a scientific programme is being developed for the study of Leonardo’s specialized “languages” (mechanics, optics, anatomy, architecture, etc.), with the aim of giving access to the various 15th and 16th century manuscript production in the Vulgar Italian. A programme of translations into English of Leonardo’s corpus has also been started. Furthermore, e-Leo is currently experiencing a further, twofold stage of development: on the one hand, we are processing manuscripts contemporary with Leonardo (such as the Zibaldone by Bonaccorso Ghiberti), and on the other hand, his literary sources (not yet published).
E-leo meets the issue of the accessibility of the Leonardian corpus, published in a number of facsimile editions between the nineteenth and the twentieth century (mainly the first half): 1. a corpus comprising a massive number of sheets; 2. Fragmented in terms of collocation; 3. extremely complex by virtue of its intrinsic features (the relationship between text and image, which distinguishes it graphically; the fragmentariness of the drawings and projects, which are rarely finished; and the difficulty of reading the texts because they are themselves fragmentary, besides being in mirror writing). At this time it is the most complete digital edition of Leonardo’s corpus. It builds on that bulk of publications of manuscripts and drawings mentioned above, providing a powerful tool for accessing it and a resource for the study and analysis of Leonardo da Vinci’s works (but also for a broader and more generalized treatment, with similar criteria, of technical-scientific texts from the late medieval and Renaissance periods). It is indeed intended to provide further points of access to the content: the index of drawings, which tries to account for and include what gets left out in a textual search; and the glossary, which attempts to describe and historicize Leonardo’s language.
