Creating and Using a Digital Version of Giovanni Villani's "Nuova Cronica"

On a 1300 pilgrimage to Rome the Florentine
merchant Giovanni Villani was inspired by the crumbling glories of the ancient metropolis. It occurred to him that his own city, the daughter and creature of Rome,
was on the rise and had need of an historian to do the
patriotic duty of a Virgil, a Sallust, or a Livy. Despite
reservations about his ability to measure up to such eminent
men, without, that is, the aid and grace of God, Villani resolved to begin a record of the “deeds and beginnings” of the Florentines and matters in the wider world. He would undertake this work “with reverence for God and Saint John, and in praise of our city of Florence”. The result, his immense Nuova Cronica, traced the working of God’s providence in the vicissitudes of Florence, Italy, and Europe; it glorified Florence as a worthy inheritor of the mantle of Rome; it revealed the righteous judgment of God against the sinful; it sought to provide a stock of moral and political exempla to future generations of Florentines.
We are engaged in an ongoing project to make this
tremendously important chronicle more widely available to students and scholars: we are creating a fully encoded and
annotated online version of the chronicle which will be accompanied by its first complete English translation.
This project is supported by an N.E.H. grant and is part of Brown University’s Virtual Humanities Lab. The V.H.L.
provides texts and databases which are encoded,
annotated, and contextualized. These include the
Decameron Web, the Pico Project, and the Catasto/Tratte.
The long term aim is to create a kind of virtual Florence
where students and scholars can access searchable versions of fundamental texts placed in rich historical
context. We hope that the streets and plazas of our electronic
Florence will serve the same social and intellectual
function as those of the original: we want the V.H.L. to be a forum for exchange and collaboration in learning and scholarship.
Professor Diakite and I began our work in the final book, which runs from 1342 through 1347. These were significant
years for the history of Florence, Italy and Europe:
the abortive lordship of Walter of Brienne, the disarray
of Angevin power in Southern Italy, the stunningly
successful campaigns of Edward III, and the first news of the Black Death. Villani shifts masterfully between the
narrow stage of his native city and the events of the wider world; his treatment is nuanced and detailed. Our choice to “begin at the end” of the chronicle was dictated by the brilliance and the usefulness of this final book.
Our first task was to develop an encoding scheme. After
much discussion about the potential scholarly and
pedagogical uses of the electronic text, we crafted a scheme
which takes in textual structure and textual elements,
citations and sources, dates, place-names, personages, and recurrent themes.
After we had fully encoded the final book of the
chronicle, we began producing annotations linking
significant words and passages to ancillary material.
Particularly important episodes will be linked to contextual
essays and bibliographies; proper names will be linked to biographies and bibliographies; place names will be linked to descriptions and maps; references to sources
will be linked, where possible, to the original texts.
Perhaps most excitingly we plan to create links to alternate
descriptions of the same events in other chronicles. The
resulting web of medieval voices, Italian and European, will provide a complex and nuanced view of the major events of the 14th century.
The fully encoded and annotated Nuova Cronica will be a powerful tool. Students and scholars will have Italian and English versions of the chronicle, richly commented and woven into a web of complementary voices. They will be able to conduct complex and fruitful searches: a student of 14th century Italian politics, for example, could easily find every occasion where Villani moralizes against
the tyrannous acts of lords while a student of 14th
century economic history could find every occasion where
Villani records a price. The most important dimension of our project, however, is the contribution we hope users will make to its development. We intend to “open the door” to scholars who are interested in working with the chronicle; they will be invited to add links to material
and to create annotations. We also intend to create a
forum for scholarly discussion and electronic publication.
We hope, in other words, that our digital text will be the center of a collective lavoro and lettura.
Our poster will trace the challenges involved in encoding and annotating a work as complex as the Nuova Cronica and will provide a preliminary balance of our accomplishments. Its focus, however, will be the relationship between scholarly and pedagogical uses of the electronic text. This was a matter of some concern as we developed our project: how could we make our electronic text both relevant for scholars and useful for students? We will describe how we sought to match our encoding scheme to two very different sets of users. We will explore ways to integrate the chronicle, along with the other components of the V.H.L., into courses on Italian literature and history. We will present sample projects which would allow students to explore our text and to exploit its encoding and annotation. We will propose ways to involve students in the work of scholars through the posting and discussion of papers in online seminars and through the use of chat rooms.