Ricerc@Sapienza

This proposal builds upon the foundations placed by the project supported under the Sapienza Awards Scheme, 2015 Exercise, aka TOTUS MUNDUS Project (www.totusmundus.it).
The main scope of the previous project was to digitalize the annotated edition of the World Atlas, Kunyou quantu (1602), by Matteo Ricci, SI as well as to making available a computational lexicon containing geographical lexemes, astronomical and other scientific lexemes, and their corresponding Chinese graphs.
This constitutes the foundation upon which we intend to (re)construct the intellectual world of XVII century Jesuit missionaries who, having been sent to far-off lands, saw map-making as a means to evangelise. By drawing boundaries and mapping spaces, Jesuits made foreign lands known to Europe and determined uncounters between mutually unknown countries.
Although the scope of the previous project was well defined, the open access data base was created by taking into account its future development to include other repositories, the ultimate purpose being a complete digitalization of Jesuit cartography.
The present proposal is a step forward in this direction, whose target is to further explore Jesuit missionary cartography by including maps produced by: 1.Ricci (already tackled in the previous project), Aleni, Sambiasi and Korean cartography; 2. Jesuit Cartography for the Iberian Colonial Empires: the contribution of G. Furlong Cardif.
The main task of this project is the creation of a digital library, an open access repository of integrated materials and a useful tool for scholars, students and citizens.