Stefano Dall’Aglio is a political and religious historian of early modern Italy. His interests include Digital Humanities, Public History and archival studies. He has worked in many Italian and international institutions such as Sapienza University, University of Leeds and University of Edinburgh. He has published several books and articles on political and religious dissent in early modern Florence and Italy, with a specific focus on Girolamo Savonarola and sixteenth-century Savonarolism, political opposition to the Medici, and letters in the Medici archives. His latest monograph (The Duke’s Assassin. Exile and Death of Lorenzino de’ Medici, Yale University Press, 2015) won the Helen and Howard R. Marraro Prize awarded by the American Historical Association and its Chinese edition is forthcoming with China CITIC Press.

The Falconieri Project presented at the workshop “I carteggi cardinalizi del Rinascimento: esperienze e progetti di digitalizzazione” at the Sangalli Institute in Florence, March 26, 2019.

The project revolves around the study and the digital edition of a corpus of some 430 letters sent to the Roman nobleman Ottavio Falconieri between 1655 and 1675, the large majority of which were written by the Florentine prince and cardinal Leopoldo de’ Medici. The letters are still unknown to scholars and the general public: they have always been in the hands of private owners and until now no one has had the opportunity to study them or even to see them. The Falconieri Project is generously funded by the Medici Archive Project’s board member Dr Howard C. Yang.

Ottavio Falconieri (1636-1675), man of culture, churchman and diplomat, spent nearly all his life in Rome, where he was in close touch with popes, cardinals, men of letters, artists and scientists. Falconieri acted as agent in Rome for Leopoldo de’ Medici (1617-1675), who had a deep interest in literature, art, and science and was one of the founders of the Accademia del Cimento, inspired by Galileo’s ideas. As a result, the letters the two men exchanged provide a priceless testimony of Florentine and Roman history in the baroque period. This interdisciplinary work combines cultural history, ecclesiastical history, art history, book history, and history of science. The topics discussed in the letters range from astronomy to scientific curiosities, from drawings to antiquities, from numismatics to literature, and the correspondence offers a vivid glimpse of society and daily life in the seventeenth century.

An essential theme is book circulation and book culture, as Leopoldo tirelessly attended to search and reading of books, promoted their production and distribution, and discussed their reception. Another important motif is the observation of the sky with special reference to planets, stars, eclipses, comets, and the building and use of telescopes, which both Leopoldo and Falconieri were keenly interested in. Many of the pivotal historical characters of the time are mentioned: not only popes, cardinals and queens, but leaders in the fields of culture, art and science such as the sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the architect Pietro da Cortona, the naturalist Francesco Redi, and the philosopher Lorenzo Magalotti. Falconieri’s correspondents also include a number of famous women like Catherine Queen of England, Mariana of Austria Queen of Spain, and Christina Queen of Sweden.

This project lies at the intersection of history and digital humanities. The transcriptions of the letter are being entered into a digital platform provided by the Medici Archive Project which will be soon put online and made freely accessible to scholars and the general public around the world. Every letter will have a database record including not only the transcription of the text but also all the relevant metadata related to the document: sender, recipient, date, synopsis, relevant people, places, and topics. Every document record also will include one or more digitized images of the document. The database will also be provided with biographical records for all the people mentioned in the documents.