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  • I Medici in rete: Ricerca e progettualità scientifica a proposito dell'archivio mediceo avant il Principato
  • Mark Jurdjevic
Irene Cotta and Francesca Klein , eds. I Medici in rete: Ricerca e progettualità scientifica a proposito dell'archivio mediceo avant il Principato. Istituto nazionale di studi sul Rinascimento: Atti di convegni 22. Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2003. xiv + 275 pp. index. €29. ISBN: 88–222–5303–5.

The Mediceo avanti il principato (MAP), a vast collection of documents and letters to and from the Medici, has long been a fundamental source for historians of Renaissance Florence. The collection is in one sense a private family archive, but because of the prominent role the Medici played in republican Florence, it is also a de facto official archive of documents relating to almost every aspect of the city's public life — economic, political, intellectual, and social. The collection of essays in I Medici in rete are the proceedings of a conference held in Florence (2000) to commemorate the completion of a major initiative of the state archives in Florence to digitize the collection and enable off-site internet access. The technical nature of most of the essays is aimed more at librarians and archivists than at historians, though there is considerable overlap in several essays.

The eight essays of part 1 consist primarily of technical contributions that present the major challenges posed by and strategies employed for the digitization process. Gigliola Fioravanti's essay briefly outlines the ASF's decision to digitize MAP, a response to the sudden, sharp, and interdisciplinary increase in scholars over the past twenty years whose work brings them to the MAP fondo. Vincenzo Franco summarizes some of the main technical and financial challenges involved in any major documentary digitization project. Rosalia Manno Tolu discusses the acquisition of twenty-eight letters addressed to Cosimo, the majority dating from the war between Filippo Maria Visconti and Florence that culminated in the Florentine victory at the Battle of Anghiari in 1440. Among the correspondents are notable participants in peninsular politics during the first half of the Quattrocento: [End Page 189] Francesco Sforza (three letters), Niccolò III d'Este (five letters), Guidantonio da Montefeltro (two letters), and Cardinal Niccolò Albergati (two letters). In separate essays, Irene Cotta and Francesca Klein survey both the historiographical inclinations of Anglo-American scholars that drew them to the MAP archive, as well as the technical implications of digitizing MAP. A particularly significant consequence, among many others, is that is no longer possible to retain a clear documentary record of user requests and interests, traditionally a valuable source of information for archivists. Andrea Zorzi considers the potentially troubling impact of the new vocabularies and research techniques implied by digitization on the practice of traditional historical research. Raffaella Maria Zaccaria provides a history of the archive and its structural organization. The final essay by Vanna Arrighi and Francesca Klein employ the MAP fondo to reconstruct the genealogy of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Medici, returning to a debate initially raised by Gene Brucker and Dale Kent.

The eight essays in part 2 shift the focus from technical aspects of the digitization project to more historical considerations of the wide variety of applications the fondo offers for students of Florentine history. Nicolai Rubinstein summarizes the relationship between the Medici and the chancery, suggesting that documents created by the Medici relationship with successive chancellors and secretaries have more in common with traditional Florentine family archives than with comparable documents from princely regimes, in which secretaries appear more often as servants than as allies, collaborators, and even friends. F.W. Kent discusses the variety of insights into Lorenzo de' Medici and Laurentian Florence that MAP has offered him over the years, and concludes that considerable sections of the fondo still remain terra incognita. Lorenz Boeninger analyzes the operating relationship between Lorenzo and the city's ambassadors to Milan, Rome, and Naples. Lorenzo was always reluctant to entrust sensitive information and subtle instructions to official documents, and instead relied on oral instructions. Because of the lacuna such a policy created in the official missive of the republic, the MAP fondo, with all its private revelations and discussions, constitutes one of the...

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