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Exploring Gregorio Dati's 15th-century Mediterranean
The La Sfera Project encompasses a number of different scholarly efforts exploring the Florentine merchant Gregorio Dati's treatise La sfera (The Globe), written sometime around 1430. It began with the #lasferachallenge, the social-media brainchild of Laura Morreale and Ben Albritton, in 2020, but has since expanded in multiple scholarly directions.
1: Translating La sfera
1: Translating La sfera
We have recently completed the first English translation of La sfera. Our bilingual translation, which will be published in Fall 2025 by Italica Press, will feature not only introductory materials and explanatory notes, by a wide range of images illustrating the diversity of the Sfera manuscript tradition. Materials documenting our translation process are available on BodoArXiv.
2: Editing La sfera
2: Editing La sfera
This part of the project is creating a new critical edition of Dati's text, which has only ever been published in a mid-19th-century edition based on a single manuscript witness. We are currently compiling a list of loci critici or significant variants for the text, which we will compare with parallel data regarding the visual apparatus and the toponyms in the marginal maps. This triangulation will significantly improve our sense of the manuscript production process in fifteenth-century Italy, particularly (but not exclusively) Florence.
3: Mapping La sfera
3: Mapping La sfera
This part of the project is applying geospatial tools and analysis to Dati's work: mapping the places he mentions in GIS, tracking which places appear in which manuscripts, and linking them to digital gazetteer(s). We will also stemmatize the toponyms in the maps, so we can compare the manuscript families we find to those we identify in the textual tradition. This effort started as the 2021 Marco Institute workshop Mapping La Sfera.
4: Tracking La sfera
4: Tracking La sfera
La sfera survives in an unusually high number of contemporary witnesses — about 160 individual fifteenth-century manuscripts. Many of these have elaborate diagrams, illustrations, and maps. We are tracking all the manuscripts of La sfera we can find and attempting a general survey of the corpus. Click here to see our list (last update May 2025).
What is La Sfera?
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