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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ATRA (Atlas of Renaissance Antiquarianism)

Teaser

Summary

During the outgoing phase of the project at the Department of Italian Studies of the University of Toronto (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), which lasted two years, I have worked on the many ramifications of antiquarian knowledge as expressed in the Annex 1 of my project.
The purpose of my Atlas of Renaissance Antiquarianism (ATRA), a digital system that will map the circulation of antiquarian learning in sixteenth-century Europe, is to contribute to the promotion of new knowledge on antiquarian studies in the Renaissance and demonstrate how the antiquarian approach â€“ that based the growth of thought on documented sources and empirical evidence â€“ played a primary role in the evolution of the entire cultural/intellectual life of Early Modern times. The ATRA database collects, confronts and interconnects published and unpublished letters of humanists and scholars who participated in spreading the antiquarian method throughout Europe. The assortment provides in-depth coverage of all aspects of Renaissance antiquarian learning and fills the present gap with a complete analysis on the subject.
Antiquarian erudition is by nature a crossroad of disciplines and, as such, many are the fields of study that will emerge from the letters gathered.
The overall objective is to empower the understanding of Early Modern antiquarian studies and promote new knowledge and research in the History of Ideas and Culture of the Renaissance with the creation of an up-to-date database - accessible to the entire academic community - that collects and studies published and unpublished epistolary works and traces the cultural interactions that took place among sixteenth-century European scholars. This will permit the identification of innovative research paths for the history of ideas in Early Modern Europe broadening the vision of Antiquarianism during the Renaissance.
Most of the results obtained are open access and freely accessible by any individual interested in them. The exploitation of the results is worldwide. It touches countries in 4 different continents, and it will help to give additional prestige to the European Institutions who have sponsored the project. Through ATRA, it is possible to put together systematically the entire mass of Renaissance antiquarian data and focus on the antiquarian culture in all of its multidisciplinary variations, allowing a new and shared reading of the concept of the past of Renaissance Europe. This will be achieved through an innovative and more complex research string that adds new categories, which can be potentially increased according to the emerging necessities of each researcher.

Work performed

Since I moved to Canada in August 2017, I was warmly welcomed by the department of Italian Studies of the University of Toronto. I was immediately assigned to an office (I share it with 2 other post-docs) and I was presented to the faculty and the students.
I was introduced by my supervisor (Konrad Eisenbichler) to several key persons of University (chairs, deans, officers) and of the centres specifically related to my discipline - Renaissance studies - such as the CRRS, Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, the CMS, Centre for Medieval Studies and the PIMS, Pontifical Institute for Medieval Studies. Prof. Elisa Brilli of the dapartment of Italian Studies guided me through the many libraries of the University.
I was also introduced to William Bowen, the director of ITER Gateway, the digital Humanities institution with which I had to develop my database.

Between the end of August and the beginning of September, I started working full time on my project. I tried to develop simultaneously all the main points of my working plan: research - publications - dissemination.

I was the first scholar to open the prestigious conference series sponsored by the department of Italian Studies at the University of Toronto, entitled Goggio Lectures (Toronto, 14 September 2017), presenting a paper on the nature of Antiquarianism; I took part to the GSAIS - Graduate Students\' Association for Italian Studies (Toronto, 16 October 2017), speaking about the influences of migration studies on early modern linguistic theories; I presented at the SCSC - Sixteenth Century Society and Conference (Milwaukee, 29 October 2017) a contribution on how antiquarian sources were used in confessional disputed during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation; I presented at CMRS - New College Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Studies (Sarasota, 10 March 2018) a paper on Renaissance numismatics; I organized 3 sessions on grotesques and presented in a digital humanities panel at the RSA - Renaissance Society of America annual meeting (New Orleans, 22-24 March 2018).
I took part

Till now, I have published about 15 among articles, some of them in top ranking international journals, and monographs and edited volumes

Final results

ATRA modified and is currently modifying the concept of antiquarian erudition of Renaissance Europe. In fact, from a first analysis of the manuscripts so far gathered, it emerges that the antiquarian method was applied not only to the Classical Tradition, but also in approaching the Middle Ages and the â€œexoticâ€ cultures of Asia, Africa and the Americas, thereby conferring to Antiquarianism a universal impact. ATRA contributed to prove that the antiquarian method contributed to the cultural breakthrough of Humanism: without the spread of antiquarian culture, the European Renaissance could not have been possible. Furthermore, the thematic-multidisciplinary approach of ATRA allows for the combination of different data belonging to the same area of interest, which, interconnected with other fields, opens unexpected and potentially unlimited research paths for future scholarship and inquiry.

ATRA is organized as an interdisciplinary project in two ways:

1) Renaissance antiquarianism includes a multitude of different disciplines; thus, it is necessary to organize its varied content in order to render it easily accessible to the academic community. Through ATRA it is possible to illustrate the critical conjunctions among different disciplines emerging from the debates of the intellectual circles, opening new pathways in research on the history of ideas. So far, ATRA has brought to the discovery of an unknown numismatic type, the ancient Roman colonial coin, by analyzing the growth of juridical studies associated with the development of archeology, zoology and figurative art. Furthermore, the combination of chronology with ecclesiastical studies permitted to open a new field of study regarding Renaissance ecclesiastical chronotaxes, never before considered in their complexity.

2) In order to permit the construction of a significant number of interconnections to be utilized at their highest potential, it is necessary to develop this digital database applying the most sophisticated means. In fact, the collaboration with UniversitÃ Caâ€™ Foscari Venezia and University of Torontoâ€™s Digital Humanities departments makes possible to cross an incredible amount of information in order to better observe the phenomenon of combination of the different disciplines related to the contents. Even more, thanks to the creation of an established parameter of research, it will be possible to evidence all the potential links, developing parallel readings of each item.