Since its founding by Edward Goldberg, Sir Mark Fehrs Haukohl, Mary Jane Harris [1] and Hester Diamond[2] in 1995, the Medici Archive Project (MAP) has been innovating new strategies for research in the Humanities.
This archival collection ― comprising over four-million letters distributed in 6,429 volumes and occupying a mile of shelf space ― covers a chronological span of two hundred years, from 1537 to 1743.
It documents the political, diplomatic, gastronomic, economic, artistic, scientific, military and medical culture of early modern Tuscany and Europe.
In the decade following its founding, graduate students, university professors, museum curators, and independent researchers paid regular visits to MAP’s workspace at the State Archive in Florence in order to have access to unpublished documentary material or to seek help with archival research strategies related to their scholarly endeavors.
Initially collected in an in-house database (Documentary Sources for the Arts and Humanities, 1537 to 1743) accessible only in situ, this vast repository of transcribed and contextualized documents was published online in April 2006, free of charge, for the benefit of the entire scholarly community.
As of 2015, this material comprises over 24,000 transcribed documentary records, 18,000 biographical entries, 87,000 geographical and topographical tags, and over 300,000 digitized images from 292 volumes of the Mediceo del Principato.
Each fellow receives one-to-one support and supervision, along with office space and specialized archival training to help them pursue advanced research for his/her doctoral thesis.
These events have hosted over sixty papers, often bridging the gap between American and European scholarship, and fostered new collaborations between MAP and research universities, other initiatives in the digital humanities, and individual scholars.
Beginning in the MAP’s earliest years, the National Endowment for the Humanities has provided generous and crucial financial resources as well as guiding directives.