Tag: Letters & Correspondence

Power of Petitioning in Seventeenth-Century England

https://petitioning.history.ac.uk/

‘The Power of Petitioning in Seventeenth-Century England’ is a two-year project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council which began in January 2019. The project team includes Brodie Waddell (Birkbeck), Jason Peacey (UCL) and Sharon Howard (Birkbeck), supported by many other scholars and contributors. This study will be the first to examine petitioning systematically at all levels of English government over the whole century. The project will create a valuable new resource by transcribing and digitising a corpus drawn from seven key collections of petitions held at national and local archives, totalling over 2,000 manuscripts. This corpus, when combined with careful contextualisation, allows us to offer new answers to crucial questions about the major social and political changes that unfolded in this formative period.

Medici Archive Project

The Medici Archive Project began as an electronic database of letters and other documents in the Medici Granducal Archival Collection and has evolved into a research institute supporting digital projects and offering seminars and fellowships.

MAP’s online collection, BIA provides access to an unparalleled range of digitized early modern material. The material comprises over 24,000 transcribed documentary records, 18,000 biographical entries, 87,000 geographical and topographical tags, and over 300,000 digitized images from 292 volumes of the Mediceo del Principato. Aside from providing a faster and more user-friendly interface for document entry, BIA has enabled scholars from all over the world, not only to view digitized images of archival documents, but also to enter transcriptions, provide scholarly feedback, and exchange comments in designated forums, all within BIA’s academic community of over 2400 international scholars, students, and enthusiasts who daily engage with one another, with the ever-increasing number of uploaded digitized documents, and with the staff and fellows of the Medici Archive Project.

Letters of William Herle Project

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 Written over the period 1559-88, William Herle’s previously unedited, unpublished, and overlooked letters are richly textured.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.

Diplomatic Correspondence of Thomas Bodley, 1585-1597

http://www.livesandletters.ac.uk/bodley/bodley.html

A large and comprehensive corpus of letters survives from the twelve years Bodley was on diplomatic business, during initial extraordinary missions as a special envoy to various European sovereigns between 1585-88, and then his long residence in The Hague during his post as English representative on the Council of State for the United Provinces (Netherlands) from 1588-97. These letters, previously unedited and unpublished, are a valuable interdisciplinary resource to scholars of religious, social, cultural, geographical, military and political history. The letters also offer an important understanding of the information networks and patronage structures between official and semi-official diplomatic agents and their patrons in the later sixteenth-century.

Circulation of Knowledge and Learned Practices in the 17thc-Dutch Republic

Circulation of Knowledge and Learned Practices in the 17thc-Dutch Republic

The project aims to explore and visualize how knowledge circulated during the booming scientific revolution of the 17th-century. The CKCC project built a web application called ePistolarium. With this application researchers can browse and analyze around 20,000 letters that were written by and sent to 17th century scholars who lived in the Dutch Republic. Moreover, the ePistolarium enables visualizations of geographical, time-based, social network and co-citation inquiries.

Correspondence of Athanasius Kircher

Correspondence of Athanasius Kircher

The Athanasius Kircher correspondence project provides access to the manuscript correspondence of Kircher, a seventeenth-century Jesuit. The project is a collaboration between the Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza in Florence, the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, and the European University Institute in Fiesole, under the direction of Michael John Gorman and Nick Wilding; it is now housed at Stanford University.