Organised by Filippo de Vivo and Emanuela Vai with support from the Oxford Centre for European History and the Digital Humanities & Sensory Heritage Network based at TORCH.
How might we do microhistory after the digital turn? We have been very fortunate to be able to organise a graduate workshop on 2 May 2023 with two experts in the field of medieval and early modern history in conjunction with Prof Nick Terpstra’s visiting fellowship at St Edmund Hall in Trinity Term 2023. Prof Nick Terpstra and Prof Roisin Cossar will conduct a two-hour workshop on microhistory after the digital turn originating from their recent research projects: Prof Terpstra will start with a general historiographical and methodological introduction partly inspired by his own DECIMA project (reading will be circulated in advance), and Prof Cossar will zoom in on her ongoing project on fifteenth-century Ferrara. There will be ample space for discussion and comparing experiences.
If you want to book a place, please email earlymodernitaly@history.ox.ac.uk by 28 April; in the event of oversubscription, priority will be given to History DPhil students. For more information please email Filippo de Vivo or Emanuela Vai. Please bring your own lunch – coffee will be provided.
Microhistory and the Digital Turn in Renaissance Historiography - Prof Nicholas Terpstra, Professor of Early Modern History, University of Toronto and President, Renaissance Society of America
As social history moved in the 1960s and 1970s from quantification towards cultural studies incorporating anthropological and sociological analysis, narratives built around the experiences of ordinary people became more common, particularly for studies of gender, sexuality, violence, and crime. Italian historians saw the potential of microstoria not only as a means to make their analyses more accessible, but even more as a means of uncovering implicit cultural paradoxes and telling contradictions by tracing the red thread of an individual life or case through archival records of various kinds. Apparent disjunctions in the historical record might resolve into unexpected conjunctions that deepened awareness of early modern customs, values, relations, and expectations. The current digital turn in Renaissance historiography brings quantification back into social history, and with it the challenge of using microstoria as an advanced analytical and narrative tool, and not simply as a shorthand term for storytelling and anecdote. The two could appear to be opposite and even competing approaches, but this study will explore current intersections of digital and social history to elucidate how microhistory shapes and is shaped by the advanced quantification of the digital humanities.
Visualizing Concubines and Servants in Fifteenth-Century Ferrara - Roisin Cossar, Professor of Medieval History and Head, Department of History, University of Manitoba
Until recently, histories of the Christian church in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance rarely examined the domestic worlds of those who lived and worked within the church. Now, a growing group of scholars is investigating the households of Christian clergy across Western Europe, and their discoveries challenge previous narratives of the history of the church and the family across the periods. This newer scholarship largely relies on the approaches of social history and feminist theory for its analytical frameworks. In this presentation, a case study from Ferrara, I examine what happens when we augment those approaches with tools borrowed from the digital turn. My source is a register created at the behest of the Dominican inquisitor Fra Bartolomeo after the local lord, Niccolò III d’Este, forced the expulsion of dozens of women from clerics’ residences in that city and diocese in 1421. The register contains interrogations of the women that describe many aspects of their lives and those of their clerical companions. Tracing the experiences of these individuals across both time and space and narrating their histories using ArcGiS StoryMaps allows us to foreground otherwise elusive details from the register. But as we do so, we need to be aware of how the quantitative aspects of mapping risk eliding nuances of written sources and presenting interpretive choices as certainties. I’ll discuss how I have sought to use the digital presentation both to illuminate previously unknown women’s experiences and to draw attention to the historian’s interpretations of the sometimes-contradictory information present in the register.
