Mapping La Sfera – A Marco Manuscript Workshop Event

Do you love maps, mapping, & manuscripts?

2 spots have opened for this event. Contact Laura Morreale lmorreale3@gmail.com for more info.

Watch our progress on twitter during this digital mapping event at #mappinglasfera

Welcome to Mapping La Sfera, a 2-day digital event to map locales named in three manuscript versions of a 15th century Italian geographic treatise, Goro Dati’s La Sfera. The event will take place on Friday, February 5 and Saturday, February 6, 2021 to coincide with the University of Tennessee Knoxville’s Sixteenth annual Marco Manuscript Workshop Immaterial Culture.

Over the course of the two day conference, three teams of five scholars each – the Mapping La Sfera (MLS) team members – will plot the place-names found in three 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 begin the task of tracking the variations in three manuscript transcriptions produced during the La Sfera Challenge, a competition that took place from May-July 2020. During the competitive scholarly event, eight copies of La Sfera were fully transcribed by participating scholars (the Sferisti), but none of the geographic locales were plotted out. Using the open access mapping platform Recogito, MLS teams will complete the work begun by the Sferisti scholars by visually plotting these locales, then bringing the completed maps back to fellow Marco Workshop participants for comparison and discussion.

Over the course of the two-day conference, MLS mappers will work with their team members via Slack to plot all 300+ place-names on the map, to review each other’s work, and to solve problems or manuscript misreadings. Final maps will be linked to the Marco Workshop page and publicized on the Marco Institute‘s Twitter account. Limited to 15 workshop participants.