Work in Progress - 'Imagining "The Globe"' & 'Digital Sepoltuario'

NB: This session will be online only.

Carrie Beneš (New College of Florida): 'Imagining “The Globe”: Digital Approaches to Merchants, Mapping, and Manuscripts'

The La Sfera Project is a collaborative venture to complete an open-access multimedia edition of Goro Dati’s La sfera (The World), an early-fifteenth-century textbook in poetic form designed to introduce the merchants-in-training of late medieval Italy to the cosmos, the natural world and Mediterranean geography. Our digital edition will showcase the richness of Dati’s treatise and manuscripts by combining text, images, and maps in ways that a static print edition cannot—thereby crystallizing a crucial transitional moment between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. 

Carrie Beneš is a cultural historian of late medieval Italy whose research focuses on urban identity, landscape, and the classical tradition. She is the author of Urban Legends: Civic Identity & the Classical Past in Northern Italy, 1250–1350 (2011), editor of A Companion to Medieval Genoa (2018), and translator of Jacopo da Varagine’s Chronicle of the city of Genoa (2019). She is Professor of Medieval & Renaissance History at New College of Florida, and co-PI of the Sfera Project.

Anne Leader (University of Virginia): 'Digital Sepoltuario: Exploring Memorial Culture in Renaissance Florence'

Though still a work in progress, the illustrated digital catalogue of tombs, altars, chapels, and other memorials in Florentine churches known as Digital Sepoltuario has been relaunched with full search capabilities. Project director Anne Leader will demonstrate the new features of the site and discuss the challenges of presenting complex historical data online.

Dr Anne Leader is a Visiting Fellow at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH). She holds a History-Art History BA from Emory University and an MA and PhD in the History of Art and Archaeology from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. Her publications include The Badia of Florence: Art and Observance in a Renaissance Monastery (2012), Memorializing the Middle Classes in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (2018), and most recently 'The Family Tombs of Santa Maria Degli Innocenti' in Lost and Found: Locating Foundlings in the Early Modern World, edited by Nicholas Terpstra, 135-63. Florence: Villa I Tatti, 2024.

The Work in Progress seminar explores the variety of subjects studied and researched at the Warburg Institute. Papers are given by invited international scholars, research fellows studying at the Institute, and third-year PhD students.

ATTENDANCE FREE ONLINE WITH ADVANCE BOOKING.