Contributors

Fabrizio Nevola

Fabrizio is Professor and Chair of Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Exeter, where he is also Director of the Centre for Early Modern Studies. In 2007 he published Siena: Constructing the Renaissance City, Yale University Press and co-authored the exhibition catalogue for Renaissance Siena: Art for a City at the National Gallery in London. He specialises in the urban and architectural history of Early Modern Italy, and his most recent research looks at the street as a social space, the urban iconography that often binds main streets into a coherent whole and the relations between public and private self-representation. On these topics he has published numerous articles, co-edited a special issue of I Tatti Studies (2013), and Street Life in Renaissance Italy is forthcoming with Yale University Press. It is this work that informs the Hidden Florence app.

Read more about Fabrizio on his webpage.

David Rosenthal

I am a historian of early modern Italy, and my research focuses on the public spaces of the city and the ways citydwellers used these spaces to work out their social identities and relationships. I’m especially interested in how urban public culture intersected with political, economic and religious change between about 1500 and 1700. These themes underpinned my work on Florence’s working-class carnival ‘kingdoms’, published as Kings of the Street: Power, Community and Ritual in Renaissance Florence (2015). They also inform my collaboration in the Hidden Florence app, from its inception to this new, greatly expanded version. More recently, I have turned to investigate the vital role of the tavern in the Italian renaissance city, and the emerging links between flooding, environmental public works and urban unemployment. I am a research fellow at the University of Exeter, working on a multi-city European (HERA) project that investigates the past and present of urban public spaces.

Daniel Jamison

Daniel is a postdoctoral fellow at Hidden Florence and DECIMA, sponsored by a grant from the University of Toronto (SSHRC) and the University of Exeter (AHRC). His doctoral research explored the political culture of late medieval Lucca through the records of the city’s customs house, and his other ongoing research threads also focus on the fascinating political moment of late-fourteenth-century Lucca. His work on Hidden Florence 2.0 draws on this passion for a rich and granular engagement with historical environments. With editing and aid from his collaborators, Daniel drafted the scripts for the Marietta, Ercole, and Niccolosa walks.

Sharon Strocchia

Sharon Strocchia is Professor of History at Emory University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of women, religion, health, and society in Renaissance Italy. She is the author of three books and two edited volumes, as well as numerous articles. Strocchia has written extensively about Renaissance convent life, gender and ritual, women’s mental health, and nuns’ artistic production. In recent years her interests have shifted to issues of health and healing in the early modern period. Her latest book, Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy, will be available from Harvard University Press in Fall 2019. Strocchia serves on the editorial board of Renaissance Studies and the advisory board of the Medici Archive Project, among other professional responsibilities.

Nicholas Terpstra

Nicholas Terpstra is Professor of History at the University of Toronto. His research deals with Renaissance and early modern Italian history, exploring questions at the intersection of politics, religion, gender, and charity. Recent publications include Cultures of Charity: Women, Politics, and the Reform of Poor Relief in Renaissance Italy (Harvard: 2013) which won the Marraro Prize of the American Historical Association and the Goodhart Gordan Prize of the Renaissance Society of America, and Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World: An Alternative History of the Reformation (Cambridge: 2015).

Terpstra launched the DECIMA project, an on-line digital map of sixteenth century Florence. Employing early modern census data and maps, DECIMA tracks occupation, gender, and wealth patterns. The longer term goal is to produce a 3D map that conveys what it was like to walk around the city, hearing its sounds, moving through its buildings, and seeing its artwork. See: N. Terpstra & C. Rose (ed), Mapping Space, Sense, and Movement in Florence: Historical GIS and the Early Modern City. (Routledge, 2016).

Colin Rose

I am an historian of early modern Italy, and my research interests focus on how communities constituted and managed themselves in unstable worlds of poverty, precarious work and potential violence. I teach at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, where I am Assistant Professor of European and Digital History. I am the Co-Principal Investigator for DECIMA, an HGIS project that explores the spatial lives of early modern Florentines (www.decima-map.net). HGIS allows me to better understand the role of physical space, and movement through it, in shaping the daily lives of early modern city dwellers. Whether looking at the residential patterns of particular professions or the prosecution of violent crime, location mattered in early modern Europe, and I am always interested in flexible and dynamic ways to explore the relationships between space, social action and spatial representations of behaviour. I have previously published on the roles HGIS can play in the study of early modern Florentine history, on vendetta and its prosecution in Bologna, and on petitioning in Parma. For Hidden Florence, I provided expert commentary on the “Crime and Punishment” walk (I thought Ercole should be nastier, overall) and wrote / voiced the Read More and Discover More sections for Ercole’s tour.

Julia Rombough

Julia is a historian of the senses, gender, and the body. Her research examines soundscapes in early modern Florence and the links between sense, health, and urban experience. She is currently completing her PhD in History at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation “Noisy Soundscapes: Female Institutions, Sound, and the Medical Body in Early Modern Florence” is supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada (SSHRC) and has been awarded a number of national and international prizes. Julia is also a researcher on the Digitally Encoded Census Information Mapping Archive (DECIMA) project, and has published a co-authored article with Dr. Sharon Strocchia on digital mapping, titled “ Women Behind Walls: Tracking Nuns and Socio-Spatial Networks in Sixteenth Century Florence”. Her forthcoming Sixteenth Century Journal article is titled “Noisy Soundscapes and Women’s Institutions in Early Modern Florence”.