Guides to the Documents

Here you will find guides to the primary source collections that underlie Mapping and Modeling Violence in Early Modern Italy. Each guide offers an orientation to a specific archival series or court collection — its institutional origins, the types of documents it contains, how those documents are organized, and what kinds of research questions they are best suited to answer. The guides are practical as well as interpretive: alongside advice for researchers planning archival visits, each guide addresses what the documents can and cannot tell us, how the logic of record-keeping shaped what survived, and where silences and gaps in the archive require particular care. The repositories represented here maintain finding aids and inventories that are invaluable starting points, but navigating these collections fully requires familiarity with early modern institutional structures, legal terminology, and archival conventions that can take years to develop. We have drawn on our own experience working in these archives to offer guidance that complements existing finding aids and helps researchers get the most out of their time with the sources. Guides will be added as the project develops.