Re: VMs: Quattrocento Minor Characters...

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Rafal,

At 17:20 03/12/2003 +0100, Rafal Prinke wrote:
> That's why exactly why I pointed it out. The scope
> is so wide that it is not achievable in reasonable
> time, IMHO. <...>
>
> But what the project (certainly involving a lot
> of hard work) can prove? There will be thousands
> of "minor" intellectuals, artists, writers and
> diplomats listed - but chances are high that
> "our" author will not be among them.

The scope of the QMC project is the Quattrocento, which (regardless of what 
I happen to believe or suspect) is a circle which may or may not intersect 
with the VMs' circle.

Even having a website listing alternate spellings of people's names would 
be a big step forward - I've seen at least five for Orfeo da Rycano, for 
example. Perhaps because it only slightly overlapped with the beginnings of 
spelling reform in English and other languages (IIRC), the Quattrocento 
suffers from inconsistency, causing great fragmentation of knowledge.

As a quick example, Cerioni mentions Orfeo da Rycano (as the owner of one 
of the ciphers in the main Milanese cipher ledger, containing a ligatured 
"4o"), but doesn't know who he was. He was, in fact, a well-known 
condottiere, controversially brought in from Florence by Cicco Simonetta to 
lead the Milanese secret police. His name appears in several manifests as 
one of Bona of Savoy's gentilhomini: and he is thought to have been a 
source for some of Jacopo Trotti's reports to the Ferrara court.

Now, it's taken me eighteen months to compile that kind of information from 
numerous fragmented sources - yet that's still probably no more than 1% of 
the dispersed, fragmented knowledge that exists in primary sources about 
the man. Now, imagine what kind of a picture of the Quattrocento could be 
built up if that kind of information were compiled about *many* different 
minor characters... that's what I'm aiming at with the QMC project.

Sure, that's a *very* different kind of history research from what is 
normally practised - but I think that there is a lot to be said for it. 
Minor characters are threads connecting places, times, and networks - 
tracing many such threads should connect history in a more social way.

Of course, it might well take a long time to build this up - but I'm simply 
trying to plant a seed. What it grows into is another matter entirely. :-)

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling..... 


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