How to use this site

Navigating the Site

The site is organized around four core features.

The interactive map allows users to explore georeferenced incidents of violence drawn from archival records. Users can filter the map by city, date range, offense type, and social category to identify spatial patterns and concentrations across the urban landscape. Clicking on individual markers surfaces case-level information and, where available, links to source documents and related scholarship.

The database provides structured, searchable access to the project's underlying prosopographical and case data. Records are organized by individual, incident, location, and legal outcome, and are designed to support both targeted searches and broader comparative inquiry. The database will expand as Phase One data — covering all six cities — becomes fully available in Summer 2026.

The research blog features narrative case studies and analytical essays drawn from the archive. Written for a range of audiences, these posts place individual cases and patterns within their broader historiographical and cultural contexts, with the aim of making early modern legal and social history accessible beyond the specialist community.

The research resources section gathers materials designed to support work in early modern Italian history and the digital humanities more broadly. The bibliography offers a curated guide to secondary literature on violence, legal culture, gender, and state formation in early modern Italy, and will be updated as the project develops. Archival guides provide orientation to the major repositories and document types drawn on by the project, including holdings at the Archivio di Stato di Venezia, the Archivio di Stato di Bologna, the Archivio di Stato di Modena, the Archivio di Stato di Verona, and the Archivio di Stato di Vicenza, with the aim of supporting researchers planning their own archival work. Methodology documentation explains the project's approaches to data collection, encoding, and spatial analysis, and is intended to be useful both for scholars working with the project's data and for those designing comparable digital history projects. Example transcriptions and translations offer annotated selections from the project's primary sources, serving as pedagogical models for students and early-career researchers learning to work with early modern Italian legal and administrative documents, as well as a resource for more advanced scholars seeking orientation to unfamiliar document types and hands.

How to Cite

Mapping and Modeling Violence in Early Modern Italy is an ongoing digital project. Because the dataset continues to grow and evolve, we ask that users include an access date in all citations to ensure transparency about which version of the data was consulted.

To cite the project as a whole:

Mapping and Modeling Violence in Early Modern Italy. Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason University. Accessed [Month Day, Year]. [URL].

To cite a specific case record:

"[Case Number]." Mapping and Modeling Violence in Early Modern Italy. Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason University. Accessed [Month Day, Year]. [URL].

Feedback and Contact

This project is a work in progress, and we welcome engagement from researchers, students, and other users. If you have questions, notice errors, or wish to discuss potential collaboration, please contact amadden8@gmu.edu