ABOUT THE PROJECT

In 2018 a stack of seven codices was rediscovered  in "the cage" of the John Miller Burnam Classics Library at the University of Cincinnati. ​Classics Librarian Rebecka Lindau secured a grant from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation in 2021 to digitize and investigate these documents. She enlisted Rolf Bagemihl (PhD NYU 1995) for his expertise in Venetian medieval and early modern documents to read and summarize the collection, and Angelica Wisenbarger, recent UC Classics PhD, to digitize it.

 

These volumes hold documents on parchment dating from the 14th to the 18th century. They come from northern Italy: Venice and surrounding areas. The documents vary in origin and purpose, but as Bagemihl writes in his initial assessment of one volume of the collection, the thread tying most together is property:

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"Most of the records regard real property and most are private. A few relate to the offices that oversaw property matters for the Venetian state, or the civic and criminal governors (podestà and bargello) of towns under Venetian control. There are records promulgated by three different doges of Venice between 1578 and 1585, in 1618, and between 1631 and 1646. There are relatively few ecclesiastical records. One document  was drawn up by a country priest in 1495. The 1458 act  in which property of a religious hospital was rented mentions eminent churchmen including an abbot and the deputy of the bishop of Treviso, Marco Barbo, whose career advanced thanks to his kinsman Pietro Barbo, a cardinal and later pope Paul II (r. 1464-71).  Through some records one seems to glimpse hardship (the thatch and burnt wall in #44), but also generosity and kindness (a handicapped person allowed quarters in #57; a dowry  paid in cash when that was not strictly required in #77)."

 

For Rolf Bagemihl's detailed initial overview of the content of each volume (along with lists of names and places and some thought about how the documents ended up together), see the following PDF:  

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There are wills, gifts, rental agreements, all sorts of notarized transactions preserved here. Many clumps of documents are further related by the characters at play: some seem to be bits of family archives, dealing with the same people and their holdings through generations.

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The digitization of these documents brought with it some interesting challenges, not least because the documents vary widely not only in content but in physical form. Parchment (or vellum) is various by nature, with the tendencies and quirks of the animal it came from often surviving the extensive processing the hide undergoes before it becomes a writing surface. This means natural holes, odd shapes, a tendency to curl; sometimes even hair survives the scraping. And in some (but remarkably few) cases, water damage, insect damage, or failing ink have rendered areas illegible.

 

In the case of these documents, further challenges abound. Some documents exceed six feet in length, some are wider than the scanning bed, and many have been folded for so long that no amount of ingenious handling can banish the creases. We made the decision not to unbind the documents for this project--this has preserved the remarkable assembly of the bound volumes, but presented the further challenge to the digitizer of the dreaded gutter. Despite these difficulties, the majority of text has made it through unscathed and legible.

 

(Nevertheless, if you encounter any problems and would like a photograph of any area with text lost to shadows, clips, creases, etc., please e-mail Angelica Wisenbarger: wisenb_a1@denison.edu with the name of the document, and she will be happy to photograph these areas from a different angle. Likewise e-mail Angelica if for any reason you would like a full-sized TIFF or JPEG file of an image.)

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Through this temporary website we aim to make this fascinating material accessible to all with an interest in it. Enjoy! 

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NAVIGATING THIS SITE

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• Find the Documents page links (1-7) at the top of this page (you may need to click "more"). This will take you to the master lists of documents from each of the 7 bound volumes.

• Documents are named in two parts, the first reflecting which bound volume they exist in (1-7), the second reflecting where they fall in that volume. This naming system remains for now, since it allows us to locate the documents physically (despite being useless regarding date and content of the document).

• For the full image and useful information, click the thumbnail. To expand to full screen, click the arrows in the upper left corner. To zoom further, you may have to save the image to your computer and open it in a photo viewing program. Hover over a thumbnail in the documents list, and a download button will appear in the lower right corner of the image.

• The document information will be updated as the project unfolds, so visit often!

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