This proposal is to fund stage 2 of Linking Evidence, a Digital Humanities project begun in 2012, which aims to produce new tools and a new model for the study of the medieval city, starting from the exemplary case of Rome. We have set up a website including the 12th-15th century descriptions of Rome and the inscriptions associated with monuments and works of art. The first stage was completed at the end of 2014, and the website is now open access. In stage 2 we will add 5 new texts, offer critical editions of the texts which still need one, provide new apparatuses and commentaries. A section on the Mirabilia Romae will be added, containing reproductions of manuscripts, comparative editions of the different versions of the text, a critical edition of the oldest version, and translations into Italian and English. A new epigraphic section will be prepared, containing critical editions and translations of the entire corpus of the medieval and early Renaissance inscriptions on the city of Rome, plus pictures of the extant ones. A catalogue of images including both photographs and graphic records of all the monuments mentioned in the descriptions and inscriptions will be prepared. We plan to upload about 1000 meta-data pieces of information and 800 images at this stage. A georeferenced map of medieval and early Renaissance Rome based on the descriptions, the inscriptions and the images will be prepared. The almost 750 items now searchable in the section Monuments, and the new ones (ca. 300) will be displayed on a single GIS map of Rome in which every item will be linked to related images and texts. Nothing like this has previously been attempted. Combining philology, Latin literature, Medieval and Humanist literature and scholarship, Middle English literature, epigraphy, palaeography, and art history, this approach will provide a new multifaceted and interdisciplinary reconstruction of medieval Rome, while offering a new paradigm to be applied to other medieval cities.
The pioneering collection of texts describing Rome compiled by Valentini and Zucchetti (Codice topografico della città di Roma, 4 vols, Rome 1940-54) is regrettably incomplete; it omits several texts, the editions are not critical, the commentaries are obsolete. Similarly, the sole edited collection of inscriptions by Forcella (Iscrizioni delle chiese e d'altri edificii di Roma, 14 vols, Rome 1869-1884) is unreliable, including serious misreadings (Forcella was not an expert in medieval palaeography and epigraphy).
Therefore, we are including in the website five texts which are fundamental for the topography of late-medieval and early Renaissance Rome and are missing in Valentini-Zucchetti, namely the Descriptio Ecclesiae Lateranensis (three versions: after 1073, 1153-54, 1159-1181), the Rithmus on the fire of St John Lateran in 1308, John Capgrave's Ye Solace of Pilgrimes (1450), the hitherto unpublished middle English text of the Newberry scroll of an itinerary to the churches of Rome (c. 1400); Pomponio Leto's Stationes Romanae (from post 1464 and 1486).
We are also undertaking a critical edition of the Tractatus de rebus antiquis urbis Romae, a text which marks the shift from the Middle Ages to Humanism (ca. 1411; Valentini-Zucchetti's edition omits nearly half of the text).
The digital and critical edition of the different versions of the Mirabilia Romae across three centuries will be an entirely new both in the study on the city of Rome and in digital textual scholarship. For the first time it will be possible for scholars from all over the world to access the different texts of c. one hundred manuscripts which are scattered all over Europe and North America and have never been studied. Scholars, and interested readers, will also be able to access the commentaries, the translations, the links to the other texts, the related inscriptions and images of our database.
The epigraphic corpus will be revised through the study of the extant inscriptions and the 15th-, 16th- and 17th-century epigraphic sylloges. The inscriptions will be photographed and made available at high resolution with the possibility to zoom in at a high detail. We are also considerably enlarging the corpus of inscriptions by including both epigraphs from the earlier period and painted inscriptions (not only in Latin, but also in Greek and in the vernacular). We will provide each inscription with a commentary and translations into Italian and English.
For the actual monuments and artworks mentioned in the texts we will offer a systematic digital catalogue of photographs, together with images of late-medieval and early modern drawings and paintings reproducing those works of art (Stage 1 only included a pilot of one monument, namely Castel Sant'Angelo).
Nothing like this has been previously attempted. The project will advance the state of the art on many different levels: 1) new critical editions; 2) new corpus of the inscriptions of medieval and early Renaissance Rome; 3) new corpus of images; 4) complete interaction between texts and images; 5) virtual reconstruction on a GIS map of the city of Rome and its evolution across the centuries based on the descriptions, the inscriptions, and the images.
In addition to the digital humanities website, two single-authored books will stem from the primary research undertaken for Linking Evidence: 1) M. Campanelli, Aurea Roma. Descrivere la città fra Medioevo e Rinascimento, which will be submitted to Laterza. The book aims to bring the results of the Linking-Evidence research to a broader audience. 2) C. Bolgia, The Long Trecento: Rome without the Popes (contracted with Brepols/Harvey Miller). This book challenges the dominant interpretation that Trecento Rome was characterized by a lengthy hiatus in artistic commission and production.
One of our main goals is to make an important contribution to the understanding of Rome (as both a place and an idea), providing for the first time a thorough reconstruction of the City and its transformations across three crucial centuries. Another main goal is to provide a unique research tool that will serve both students and scholars researching Rome (including comparative studies) from a historical, art historical, topographical, archaeological, literary and philological point of view; we aim to produce a new website that will transform both the understanding of and research on medieval and early modern Rome. This has the potential significantly to advance research in many disciplines and to have an impact which goes beyond the individual outcomes of the research of the individual scholars involved in the project. On a broader level, our long-term aim is to provide parameters which can be applied to the widespread genre of descriptions of medieval cities, offering an innovative model by which to study such cities from a new perspective.