Abstract
The project ON: Objects in network investigates the social life of things in fifteenth-century Italy. Drawing on a concept elaborated by social anthropologists and sociologists, ON explores the written traces that different types of objects, and the social relationships around them, left in the exceptionally rich documentary legacy of the notarial serial sources of four cities: Benevento, Bologna, Genova, and Perugia. This comparative investigation of the Italian urban society will allow a deeper understanding of the lifestyle, purchasing power, consumption practices, and social relationships (within and beyond those institutionalized) as embodied by the (mercantile or not) circulation of objects. By programmatically focusing on the “micro-circulation” of different types of artefacts within clearly defined communities (i.e. inside the city), ON will contribute to shifting the focus of historiographical enquiry from the international market to human networks and from economic value to the social, material and relational value of objects. This approach aims to gain a deeper and more nuanced understanding of how exchanging things was able to shape and transform personal relationships. In this perspective, notarial serial sources open an extremely rich field of research since they recorded not only the value of things but also the networks of relationships around them. The fifteenth-century Italian urban environment offers an ideal context for this type of research, since it allows us: 1) to valorise the vast – and largely unexplored – deposit of late medieval notarial documents; 2) to trace the objects’ circulation in the consumption practices and the everyday life of specific communities; 3) to assess whether and how the incipient development of a (mass) consumption society is visible in the lifestyle of early Renaissance Italy, that is, whether and to what extent this transformation influenced everyday life and social relationships. In addition to using historical, palaeographical, and diplomatic skills, the project will investigate notarial sources also through digital tools, particularly the databases already created ad hoc for this type of document. The adoption of the linked open data (LOD) technology will make possible: the georeferentiation of places; the indication of relationships of kinship or affinity; the connection between people and places (birth, life, death); the connection between places and professions. These data will allow to draw a social map of the cities under consideration and, by sharing data online, the project will contribute to the collective effort to build the “big data of the past” and to the discussion about methodological issues and challenges that such process involves. For unedited sources, the project will experiment also with AI systems for automatic transcription, since this type of tool promises to be crucial for the study of large corpora of serial sources. RESULTS ACHIEVED The Bologna research unit, coordinated by Prof. Tommaso Duranti, focused on the analysis of the fifteenth-century Memoriali registers of the Commune of Bologna, preserved in the Archivio di Stato di Bologna (Ufficio dei Memoriali, Memoriali, vols. 320, 321), on which a comprehensive archival, diplomatic, and institutional investigation was carried out, also in relation to the series of Provvisori dei Memoriali. The PRIN made it possible to complete the testing of several HTR software packages in order to identify the one best suited to training on the numerous and varied hands of the 33 different notaries. The choice ultimately fell on Transkribus, with which - through 26 models built on Bolognese notarial hands of the late thirteenth, the fourteenth, and the first half of the fifteenth century - a specific mixed mega-model was produced, named “Petroniano”. Once this phase was completed, the “Petroniano” model was made available to the other research units, to be tested on the hands of coeval notaries from other geographical areas; testing on these further documentary corpora made it possible to refine the model further, yielding transcriptions with an accuracy of approximately 70% as verified by means of Transkribus’s computational accuracy tool. It also made it possible to produce a raw transcription of the Memoriali registers contained in volumes 320 and 321. This proved indispensable as a first orientation for the members of the research unit in selecting the acts to be analysed. Working from this draft transcription, the individual members of the unit then proceeded to check the thematically selected acts against the originals - acts that had been assigned to the specific thematic investigations into the circulation and the role of objects. At the same time, the PRIN project made it possible to complete the construction of the relational architecture of the MemoBo database. built on the xDams platform in collaboration with the company Regesta.exe. The database was designed starting from two late-thirteenth-century Memoriali registers - simpler at this first stage, since they consist of summary entries of the acts - after which its structure was adapted to the fifteenth-century acts, which are recorded in full. The database’s definitive relational architecture, equipped with a Digital Library containing photographic reproductions of the registers under consideration, made it possible to populate it with the data of registers I/1, II/69, and I–XIII/320. A further experiment, moreover, led to the creation of a tagging system directly within Transkribus which, for the registers of volume 320, enabled semi-automatic importation in raw form directly into the database. This imported material was then corrected and supplemented manually. The various case studies demonstrated that tracing objects circulating by routes outside the market is useful for reconstructing familial and social relationships and dynamics that lie beyond commerce. The object understood not merely as a commodity thus proved a useful analytical tool for investigating notarial practices, patrimonial practices, social dynamics, the role of women in society and the economy, and emotional valences. We have termed “oggetti scritti” [‘written objects’] the objects that emerged from the documentary typologies examined: they retain, in fact, both the properties of writing - and of notarial writing in particular - and those of materiality (through their description, naturally). They in some way reify, albeit within discourse, the legal actions conveyed by the documents that name them; yet they are considered together with the non-material elements that those same legal actions represent, elements to be understood as indispensable if the object is not to be reduced to a merely material one. This brings to light that nature as a social and relational entity which the most recent historiography, in the debate on the various forms of the material turn, attributes to object as a historical witness. The outcome of this investigation revealed objects that do indeed possess a social life of their own, yet are inescapably bound to the human gaze - both that of their own time and that of the present day. The decision to dwell on private documentation, and specifically on notarial acts, confirmed that an action bearing legal significance possesses an inescapable performative force, one that must be kept firmly in mind when addressing the object that stands at its centre or that, at times, is merely named within it. This is an aspect that makes such sources particularly fertile, because circulation attested in legal form by its very nature implies the trace of a relationship. An object whose circulation, or whose intended circulation, is set down in writing by an expert and in legal form becomes a sign and a trace of reciprocal bonds. The investigation also made it possible to reflect on the problems and the opportunities inherent in large documentary series, which must be considered in their entirety as well, and not merely as individual deposits of data. Principal outcomes of the Bologna unit: Academic convening of the PRIN’s concluding international conference: Oggetti in rete. Circolazione, cultura materiale e rapporti sociali nelle fonti notarili tardomedievali (Bologna, 9-11 June 2025). Publications resulting from the project and funded with PRIN funds: - E. Loss, F. Guernaccini, M. Carassai, From Manuscript to Metadata: experiments on Handwritten Text Recognition, Tagging and Importation for the Memoriali series (1265–1452), in «JLIS.it», 16, 2 (May 2025), pp. 59-85 [open access: https://doi.org/10.36253/jlis.it-641]. - Oggetti scritti. Circolazione, cultura materiale e rapporti sociali nelle fonti notarili tardomedievali, ed. G.T. Colesanti, T. Duranti, V. Ruzzin, 2 vols., Genoa 2026 [open access: vol. I; vol. II] - MemoBo. Database per i Memoriali del comune di Bologna, ed. T. Duranti, G. Cò, E. Loss [open access: https://memobo.unibo.it] The Bologna unit also collaborated with the other research units in the creation of the virtual exhibition for the dissemination of the results [https://objectsinnetwork.cnr.it].
Dettagli del progetto
Responsabile scientifico: Tommaso Duranti
Strutture Unibo coinvolte:
Dipartimento di Storia Culture Civiltà
Coordinatore:
ALMA MATER STUDIORUM - Università di Bologna(Italy)
Contributo totale di progetto: Euro (EUR) 236.870,00
Contributo totale Unibo: Euro (EUR) 87.394,00
Durata del progetto in mesi: 24
Data di inizio
28/09/2023
Data di fine:
28/02/2026
