Research Guides: Italian Renaissance Literature & Culture: Primary Sources

eBoiardo at Columbia

eBOIARDO focuses on theatrical, musical, and artistic representations based on Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato, Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, and other Italian Renaissance romance epics. Content includes videos, works of art, music, maps, etc. Amazing project led by Prof. Cavallo!

Digital Dante at Columbia

The newly revamped and relaunched Digital Dante project is the result of a collaboration between Columbia University's Department of Italian, the Humanities & History division of the Columbia Libraries, and Columbia's Center for Digital Research and Scholarship.

Primary Source Databases at Columbia

Art theorists of the Italian Renaissance The database is a collection of treatises on art and architecture from the period 1470 to 1775. It is structured around the two Italian editions of Giogio Vasari's Lives of the Artists.
Early European books: printed sources to 1700
Diverse array of printed sources from the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries held in European libraries. Full-colour, high-resolution facsimile images scanned directly from the original printed sources. Each item in the collection is captured in its entirety, complete with its binding, edges, endpapers, blank pages, and any loose inserts as well as marginalia and annotations (when extant).
Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) Provides full-text and full-page-image access to a vast range of English-language and foreign-language titles printed in the United Kingdom between 1701 and 1800, along with thousands of important works from the Americas. Includes books, pamphlets, broadsides, and ephemera
Electronic Enlightenment Searchable and browseable database offering extensive access to the web of correspondence between the greatest thinkers and writers of the long eighteenth century and their families and friends.
Mirabile: Archivio digitale della cultura latina medievale Mirabile is an online content aggregator of medieval resources. It contains extensive databases of medieval studies resulting from collaboration between the Società Internazionale per lo Studio del Medioevo Latino (SISMEL) and the Fondazione Ezio Franceschini (FEF) and their journals published by SISMEL - Edizioni del Galluzzo.
Opera Del Vocabolario Italiano (OVI) via ARTFL
A database containing nearly 2,000 vernacular texts (21.2 million words, 479,000 unique forms), the majority of which are dated prior to 1375, the year of Boccaccio's death. Now available through ARTFL which has a variety of other resources, most relating to the history of the French language.
Witchcraft in Europe and America The majority of texts are in Latin, English and German, although there are also selected items in French, Italian, Portuguese, Danish, Dutch and Spanish.

Italian Studies Digital Humanities Projects

Decameron Web @ Brown This XML electronic edition of Boccaccio's Decameron and other works, and the accompanying hypermedia archive of contextual materials, are conceived as an encyclopedic gateway into late medieval life and culture.
DECIMA: Mapping Early Modern Florence The word ‘decima’ translates literally to ‘one tenth’ in Latin and Italian. The DECIMA Project takes its name from the 1561 decima tax, a 10% property value tax. DECIMA is also an acronym that stands for the Digitally Encoded Census Information & Mapping Archive.While most digital mapping of pre-modern cities focuses on the built environment, few also integrate comprehensive and comparative sets of city-wide data that include elements like human movement or economic activity. We built DECIMA to fill this critical gap and to give historians bold new ways to ask important questions. How did Florentine citizens respond to plague, where did they work, what pathways did they highlight for tourists, what sounds did they hear?
Florentine Renaissance Sources From the Virtual Humanities Lab at Brown University. This site gives access to a database (c. 165,000 records) with information about office holders of the Florentine Republic during its 250-year history. An edition of the Tre Maggiori, Guild elections and Birth registrations is now available. The Gazeteer gives access to a database of ca. 750 items that can be located on the Buonsignori map of 1584/94. It also includes the Online Catasto of 1427.
The French of Italy at Fordham This website, in conjuction with Fordham's French of England and French of Outremer sites, aims to expand awareness of these two kinds of French texts—both those composed and those copied in Italy—and the communities in which they were produced, to encourage new scholarly approaches to the literary and historical evidence. Texts were produced within the context of specific literary communities, each with its own geographic sphere of influence. These include: The Franco-Italian Communities, The Italian Angevins, and The Franco-Fiorentini. Includes maps and glossary.
The Galileo Project at Rice The Galileo Project is a source of information on the life and work of Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). The aim is to provide hypertextual information about Galileo and the science of his time to viewers of all ages and levels of expertise.
Galileo’s Library (Bowdoin College) The “Galileo’s Library” digital humanities project asks many questions: What is a library? What are the best digital tools for recreating a library as an intellectual artifact? How does one digitally navigate a book collection as a learning tool? What kinds of computation are possible with data about an historical library? Descriptions of libraries often rely on the geographical or historical coverage of the objects, the textual content of the books, or even the networks of ideas and people they represent, all of which are partially incomplete in the case of Galileo’s library.
HyperCities (Rome) at Stanford Built on the idea that every past is a place, HyperCities is a digital research and educational platform for exploring, learning about, and interacting with the layered histories of city and global spaces. Developed though collaboration between UCLA and USC and using Google Maps and Google Earth, HyperCities essentially allows users to go back in time to create and explore the historical layers of city spaces in an interactive environment. Explore maps and walks of Rome from 211 CE- 1979 CE.
Interactive Nolli Map at U of Oregon The Nolli Web Site presents the 1748 Nolli map of Rome as a dynamic, interactive, hands-on tool. The public now has access to cataloged information about the map in both written and graphical form.
The Medici Archive Project Including the new BIA database for accessing the epistolary collections of the Florentine Grand Dukes, the Medici Archive Project is dedicated to fostering scholarship about the Medici. This resource is indispensable to those working on the Medici family and on Renaissance Florence as well as anyone interested in international diplomacy in the early modern world. It contains over three million letters and documents from the Medici Granducal Archive.
Oregon Petrarch Open Book The OPOB includes Ettore Modigliani’s diplomatic edition of the Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta; Gianfranco Contini’s edition and Giuseppe Savoca’s critical edition; the commentary by Alessandro Vellutello (1525), the Spanish and French translations by Enrique Garcés and Vasquin Philieul (16th century), an English translation (A. S. Kline), and partial translations in Russian, Chinese, Japanese and German. *You must set up an account.
The Orlando Furioso Atlas A DH project from Muhlenberg College that explores Ariosto’s epic spatially, geographically and cartographically in a hyperlinked concordance.
Petrarchive TEI-encoded edition with maps and indexes of Petrarch’s songbook.
Progetto Pico (Brown University and Università degli Studi di Bologna) The Brown-University of Bologna Pico Project began as a collaborative online annotated edition of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola's Oration on Human Dignity (1486), presented in its first printed edition (Bologna, 1496). It now includes Pico's Conclusiones Nongentae Disputandae (1486), or 900 Theses. Using the VHLaboratory platform, scholars and students of Pico can contribute to the translation and annotation of the Theses from anywhere in the world. Additional texts by and on Pico will be added in the near future, including digital versions of the incunabula held at the Brown and Bologna libraries.
Theater That Was Rome Project at Brown The Theater that was Rome looks at the creation of early modern Rome as a theater populated by a cosmopolitan group of engineers, artists, architects, authors, printers and publishers, gardeners, pilgrims, clerics, aristocrats and intellectual cardinals who contributed to the flood of printed information that proceeded from early modern interest in the physical and mythological city.
Visualizing Venice Visualizing Venice is a series of inquiries into how social and economic change shaped the city of Venice over time. Using documents/archival sources, collaborative groups of students map and model the process of change in the city.