Do you love maps, mapping, & manuscripts? C0me join us for this digital mapping event!
Following the La Sfera Challenge, and the Mapping La Sfera event held in conjunction with the University of Tennessee Knoxville’s Sixteenth annual Marco Manuscript Workshop Immaterial Culture, a group of scholars has come together in a mapping project that will plot the place-names found in several manuscripts of Goro Dati’s geographic primer, La Sfera.
Written in ottava rima, Dati’s work was copied and re-copied for generations of school boys from Italy’s merchant class, and exists in over 150 extant copies. Some copies are richly illustrated, featuring colorful maps of the Mediterranean and diagrams of the heavens, while others remain unadorned, plain versions of the text with no visual content. All of them contain an extensive collection of place names to familiarize young merchants-to-be with locales they might visit during their Mediterranean sea voyages. Not surprisingly, the list of locales varies from one manuscript to the next, but the variations that appear across the many witnesses to the La Sfera text have yet to be tracked.
MLS mappers will continue the task of tracking the variations in the eight manuscript transcriptions produced during the La Sfera competition that took place from May-July 2020. Over the course of the project MLS mappers will work on Team Topography to identify and locate the toponyms listed in the corpus, or on Team Maps to examine the images found in five of the eight digitized versions. Team members will communicate via the project Slack to plot all 300+ place-names on the map, to review each other’s work, and to solve problems or manuscript misreadings. Sign up now to join the fun!
Yale, Beinecke MS 946, f. 22v. 
Vatican Library Vat.lat.7612, 1r. 
Kenneth Spencer Research Library, Pryce MS P4, f. 8v
