Een passie voor Napels

We’re constantly on the lookout for digital resources to incorporate into, or link out to, our Medieval Naples pages. Recently we came across some wonderful photos of medieval and modern Naples on the site Een passie voor Napels (A Passion for Naples: A Cultural Travel Guide) curated by Henk Woudsma. The site uses a blog format, with a fine index of sites, to offer a detailed look at the city's major monuments, its urban fabric, street life and high culture. The site is written in Dutch and uses Google Translate for an English version.

With Henk’s kind permission we’ll be featuring some of his photos and other resources in our Interactive Map of Medieval Naples and web galleries, linking out to his originals.

We recommend the site to all and invite you to suggest other resources.

(Photo: © Henk Woudsma)

With the end of the summer we return to our work on Naples. This autumn we’ll be adding more texts, images and hyperlinks to resources for our pages of readings.

In the meanwhile, we wanted to let you know that our open-access resources for medieval Naples are proving quite popular with readers. The free and downloadable Bibliography has already received over 10,000 downloads, while our Interactive Map of Medieval Naples has to date received over 9,700 views. We’ll keep editing and expanding both resources in the months ahead.

We’re also happy to inform our readers that Caroline Bruzelius’s chapter on Art and Architecture in High and Late Medieval Naples is in its final stages of editing and will be available to readers soon this fall.

The Hohenstaufen

We’ve begun posting texts for Chapter 5, the Hohenstaufen period, beginning with the reign of Frederick II. These include selections from Villani, the Licterae Generales establishing the University of Naples, and some trade insurance documents concerning trade at the port of Naples.

We'll be expanding this chapter soon with additional texts.

Naples on Google Books

We've recently experienced some of the benefits and pitfalls of using Google Books as a resource for the study of the Neapolitan past. We report on this experience in the June 12, 2009 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, available today online in an article entitled "Google Books Mutilates the Printed Past"

and accessible free for the next week.

Mutilation — of kingdoms and of scholarship — emerges as a key theme.

Psalter of Cristoforo Orimina

The liturgical psalter illuminated by Cristoforo Orimina is online with E-Codices, Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland.  The manuscript is Genève, Bibliothèque de Genève, Comites Latentes 15. Shown here is fol. 29r. Orimina was a court painter during the reigns of Robert of Anjou and Giovanna I and probably completed this manuscript some time between 1335 and 1350 for the house of Agnes de Périgord  (1305–1345), the widow of Robert’s youngest brother, John of Gravina, duke of Durazzo. The arms at the center bottom show those of Talleyrand-Périgord and of Armagnac. The manuscript shows the clear influence of Roberto di Oderisio, responsible for the frescoes in Sta. Maria Incoronata. According to some scholarship it reflects the influence of Franciscan ascetics at the Angevin court. Perhaps, but the manuscript is also replete with delightful marginal images of people at sport and play, making music, dancing, showing off the latest fashions, and in general demonstrating the love of life for which Naples and its court were well known in the mid-fourteenth century.