Congratulations to Laura Ingallinella (CMS / Italian Studies) and her co-PIs, Carrie Beneš (New College of Florida), Amanda Madden (Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media), and Laura Morreale (independent scholar) who has been awarded a major grant as part of the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Scholarly Editions and Translations program. This grant will facilitate the collaboration of the La Sfera Project, an open-access multimedia edition of Goro Dati’s 15th-century poem La sfera (The Globe).
As a Florentine merchant, Dati led an exciting life: he was disappointed by deals that fell through, robbed by pirates, and cheated by unscrupulous partners. Toward the end of a fifty-year career in both commerce and politics, he wrote La sfera to introduce fellow merchant venturers to the cosmos, the natural world, and Mediterranean geography. According to Carrie Beneš, who will oversee the analysis and presentation of La sfera’s maps, “There are more than 160 handwritten manuscripts of La sfera, each one of which is unique; our digital edition will showcase the richness of Dati’s treatise by combining text, images, and maps in ways that a static print edition cannot.” Ingallinella, who will lead the work on the poem’s Italian edition, adds, “La sfera was read in the fifteenth century by dukes, merchants, and schoolchildren; now we hope to create a space that welcomes everyone interested in the premodern period into Dati’s world.”
Congratulations to Laura and her team!
