This volume represents the culmination of a pair of research projects that employed spatial technologies to explore Renaissance Florence. DECIMA (Digitally Encoded Census Information and Mapping Archive) was a major project at the University of Toronto which engaged in the herculean task of not only digitizing Cosimo I's Decima ricerca census of 1561, which enumerated no fewer than 58,023 individuals, but geo-coding it to Stefano Buonsignori's 1584 aerial view of the city. The second project, ‘Hidden Florence’, employs a experiential, rather than quantitative approach. Together, they combine to offer an unprecedentedly detailed and wide-ranging survey of early modern Florence, and also an excellent showcase of the potential, and challenges, of digital humanities techniques in early modern urban history.
The technical challenges of mapping a dataset such as the Decima are detailed in Colin Rose's opening chapter. While Historical GIS (Geographical Information Systems) is now a relatively well-established field, the difficulties in mapping medieval and early modern data still challenge each new project, each of which seem to come up with new solutions. The circle that must be squared is translating pre-modern relational descriptions of geographical locations with modern Cartesian co-ordinate systems used by the software. The pragmatic solution adopted here is to accurately establish co-ordinates for corners of blocks, but to simply plot all remaining properties at equal intervals along the street frontages. Rose illustrates the immediate insights that can be gained by mapping demographic and social information, such as the distribution of service industries and wealth distributions within trades.
Other chapters in the first section explore the nature of the Decima as a source for residence and property ownership. Leah Faibisoff discusses the original collection of taxation information by Cosimo I in ‘The route of governmentality’. ‘Route’ here literally refers to the geographical paths followed by the census takers, which can be recreated from the surviving records, and which were essential in the research method of this project. Eduardo Fabbro describes the complex process of rendering this inconsistent (in modern terms) source into the tabular format required by a GIS. The important point is made that while this was a process of translation, it did not transform its nature. The final paper in the first section, by Daniel Jamison, explores the complex and varied question of property ownership and tenancy arrangements, one of the more unusual insights offered by the Decima records.
The second section offers case-studies of thematic social and economic research carried out using the DECIMA database. Sharon Strocchia and Julia Rombough's paper correlates a 1548–52 census of the city's nuns with the Decima to explore their social origins. Illustrating the difficulties of record-linkage of early modern data, they were largely unable to locate individual paternal households, but rather used the nuns as a window to examine the city-wide interests of their wider (elite) families, and consider their social strategies. Nicholas Terpstra's paper explores social division of spaces at the other end of the social spectrum by examining evidence for the sex trade. While the initial aims of linking records and examining spatial correlation between prostitutes, clients and magistrates again evidently proved over ambitious, the exploration of the social and economic characteristics of neighbourhoods where prostitutes did practise is intriguing. John Henderson and Colin Rose's paper previews Henderson's work on plague in Florence, and again by correlating other data with DECIMA, examines deaths in relation to established population densities, but with time as the organizing principle (a difficult trick in GIS).
The third section of the volume focuses on experiential interpretations of the city. Niall Atkinson explores soundscape with a focus on parochial territories, considering daily sequences of bells and rogation day processions. Nicholas Eckstein's paper muses on approaches to mapping emotions such as fear, including mapping nuisances associated with infection. Finally, Fabrizio Nevola and David Rosenthal's paper introduces their mobile app ‘Hidden Florence’ as a way to engage with the sixteenth-century city by walking the modern city.
The editors’ conclusion is entitled ‘Towards early modern spatial humanities’, which encapsulates one of this volume's great strengths. Terpstra and Rose address the particular epistemological challenges faced by historians addressing the early modern city using digital tools, and the not-unfounded reticence towards digitized quantification from those hardened by the realities of the archive. The honesty with which the papers in the volume discuss their processes, and their failures, as well as their successes, is one of its great strengths, and provides a wonderful case-study of the ups and downs of conducting a large digital humanities research project. Terpstra invokes the tech industry mantra ‘fail early, fail often’ to describe the creative experimentation which can be embraced within the digital humanities (p. 109). Once data is digitized in a comprehensive manner, the questions to be asked and linkages to be made are endless. The volume undoubtedly also has much to offer in terms of the history of Florence, and early modern cities in general. All of the papers emphasize the fact that despite the panoptic aims of the Decima, it can only represent one of many and varied parallel ways in which sixteenth-century Florentines used and experienced the space of their city. There is no doubt that this volume should be of great interest to all historians of early modern cities as well as all digital humanists.
