Abstract:

Bartolomeo Gamba spent his life among books and bibliophiles, something reflected in his personal collection of the correspondence of eminent Italian scholars. The collection he assembled amounts to a total of about 4,000 individual letters, and common themes that may be picked out from the content of these letters include book purchases, book exchanges, and discussions of current French and English editions. The first aim of the Bartolomeo Gamba Project is to ingest metadata into EMLO for all the letters that formed part of the original collection, circa 4,000 letters in total. As most were written by professors or alumni of Padua University  — the majority of whom were physicians — their relevance to early modern science and to the Republic of Letters cannot be overestimated.
The second aim of the Bartolomeo Gamba Project is to produce scholarly publications which will analyse the context of formation of the collection in Venice, its split between Vienna and Bassano, and its subsequent afterlife.
The main importance of the Gamba collection lies in the amount of data that may be extracted about the penetration and functioning of the English and French book trade in Northern Italy, including Tuscany, from the second half of the sixteenth to the first half of the nineteenth century, and the content of these letters supply scholars with primary evidence about a wide range of subjects that include, amongst many others, the book trade, the formation of the modern state, church-state relations, the relationship of antiquarian practices to the rise of science, and early modern scientific academies.

Research fellow:
Dr. Vittoria Feola