Giovanni Della Casa’s Correspondence: A Hidden Treasure toward a Database Publication

• In Event: Early Modern Letters: A Renewed Success I

Abstract

In the last decades, particularly since his papers came to the Vatican Library, Giovanni Della Casa has been the object of renewed scholarly attention, that resulted in major conferences and annotated editions. On the contrary, his correspondence is still largely unpublished, although extraordinarily interesting, as testified from the selection included in old editions. Claudia Berra, after a long work on dellacasians papers and letters, has developed (with Stefano Carrai, Università di Siena) a project aiming at the census of the author’s letters, their digitalization and their insertion into a database. The paper here proposed will present: a) a state of the art of the issue, both on critical and ecdotical sides, including new information (and new mss.) that emerged during the research; b) a plan of work for the construction of the database; c) methodological and philological issues which, related to this particular case, might nonetheless be of general interest.

Author

• Claudia Berra, Università degli Studi di Milano