Federica Gigante
My research examines the transmission of knowledge and the movement of things, people, and ideas between the Islamic world and Italy in the Early Modern period. I am interested in how artefacts, manuscripts, scientific instruments, and natural specimens travelled from the Islamic world to Italy. Who, in Islamic land, selected these objects for export? Which routes did they take? What type of information travelled with the items and who delivered it? Largely based on archival sources, my research is aimed at unearthing the network that facilitated this transmission of knowledge across the Mediterranean, from Ottoman slaves at the port of Livorno to Armenian merchants setting off from the Eastern Mediterranean coast.
My monograph (in preparation) concentrates on the collecting of Islamica and procurement networks of the Medici protégé and agent Ferdinando Cospi in seventeenth-century Italy. Drawing on a wealth of unpublished archival sources, it sets the collecting efforts of Cospi and the Medici patronage which fuelled his collection in the context of the wider Italian political climate. In particular, it highlights how these objects were used by the Medici to further their claims for maritime supremacy over the Mediterranean and served as currency in their negotiations of political alliances in the Italian peninsula.
I am one of the convenors of the Early modern Italian seminar.
