University College Cork

Partly by background, partly by inclination, I have long been drawn to topics connected with transition, transmission and translation, in the broadest senses. Hence the direction much of my recent research has taken, in the areas of mediality and communication, within and among physical and mental spaces, between past and present.

HISTORY OF KNOWLEDGE

At Harvard I created a unique research instrument, entitled Italy in the Baroque (over 300,000 words), later published as a book and including the first English translations and editions of key seventeenth-century texts in fields ranging from literary and art criticism, to political theory, to spirituality, and to natural knowledge.  This research led to a work, The Social History of Skepticism (Johns Hopkins), essentially offering an alternative interpretation of Baroque culture organized around the theme of knowledge acquisition, verification and communication. Much of the research for that book was carried out in the criminal archives of the papal state in Rome; and the encounter with these records led me to the figure of Orazio Morandi, purveyor of information, collector of handwritten newsletters, and astrologer to cardinals and popes. His spectacular rise and fall within elite Roman society seemed to exemplify the troubled story of contested, secret and sacred knowledge at the end of the Renaissance.  In the monograph Morandi’s Last Prophecy (Princeton) I attempted to take the measure of Baroque culture once again, this time according to a reading that took occult interests far more into account than I had in the previous book.  I was still not satisfied with having understood completely the role of the early modern state in the knowledge question, when I encountered yet another figure, purportedly Morandi’s mentor in astrological studies in Florence:  namely, Don Giovanni de’ Medici. 

COMMUNICATION AND EXCHANGE

The study on Don Giovanni, a figure of paramount interest in many respects, has been growing to greater proportions over the years, and the discovery of personal letters between him and his mistress, the mattress-maker’s daughter Livia Vernazza (which I published in Amore e guerra nel tardo Rinascimento [Polistampa 2009]), occasioned a radical detour from the main line of research down a somewhat related byway:  the history of the communication and expression of love and emotion using language and symbols. The book based on this new research, entitled A Mattress-Maker’s Daughter, came out on Harvard University Press in 2014.  My current completed monograph, concerning reading and gender in the long sixteenth century appeared recently on Bloomsbury, entitled, Angelica’s Book and the World of Reading in the Late Renaissance.

Also in the realm of the history of knowledge exchange, I am currently engaged with the Milan-based national edition of the works of the eighteenth-century University of Padua biologist Antonio Vallisneri to produce a digital edition of the university lessons, a unique document on the history of university education and the oral transmission of ideas to listeners.  Some of the preparatory work for this Medical Humanities project appeared in “Learned Journals and Teaching at the University of Padua in the Early Eighteenth Century,” in Archives internationales d’histoire des sciences, 2014.

As Chief of Research of the Medici Archive Project located in Florence, Italy, I oversaw creation of the beta version of the Arts and Humanities database, using a novel private funding model and a laboratory with 9 full-time three-year fellows. In that period the database was populated with over 15,000 records of the contents of Medici family correspondence; it is now at one-third more that number, and online with 20,000 hits per month.

While still at Harvard I began assembling a research network on media history; and the first production, concerning information and politics, was published by Routledge as The Politics of Information (co-editor Sabrina Baron), sold successfully and has now taken on a second life as an e-book.

CULTURE AND EXCHANGE

Later at Jacobs University in Bremen I built the research group ‘Culture and Exchange,’ with 11 collaborators from the USA, Sweden, Austria, UK, Italy, France, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Spain, Hungary.  The project investigated the impact of the early modern information explosion on perceptions of local and regional community referring to the Hegelian idea of ‘contemporaneity’ (theorized by Benedict Anderson, 1991), while attmpting to provide the first detailed description of the political information networks that began to join the cities of Germany to other parts of Europe in the early modern period.  Major partners in this initiative were the Presseforschung unit at Jacobs University Bremen, the University of Venice, and the University of Louvain.  A 2006 conference in Bremen, Germany, was entitled ‘Time and Space on the Road to Modernity’; another was held on December 6-8 2007, in Bremen, entitled ‘Places of News.’ Out of this project there emerged a volume published by Ashgate (December 2010) entitled The Dissemination of News and the Emergence of Contemporaneity in Early Modern Europe.  

DIGITAL CULTURES

Arrived at University College Cork in 2009, I served as the local P.I. for the nationally diffused Digital Arts and Humanities PhD degree program, in which I was responsible for the local share (1.6m euro) of the grant funded by the Irish Ministry for Educationn and Science, and at Cork this produced ten dissertations in the first six years and numerous peer-reviewed publications, as well as spin-off programs in the Digital Humanities realm.

The results of the contemporaneity project suggested that scaling up our inquiry using a uniform database would greatly advance our understanding of the integrative potential of infrastructure developments in general, and the relative importance of structure and discourse in the process of European integration in particular. This is a working hypothesis for the EURONEWS project, for which I received the 1m euro Advanced Laureate award in 2019 from the Irish Research Council. To facilitate the creation of this database for the 150 year period from 1550-1700, we are focusing on a single pioneering genre of news production, namely, the handwritten newsletters that circulated throughout Europe in this period.  Again, for the sake of convenience, we have chosen to analyze the single most important collection of these newsletters, i.e., the 200 or so volumes existing in the Florentine State Archive.  

The next step will be to widen the scope of this inquiry by documentary sources of early news all over Europe.