Raphaële Mouren (Head of Research Collections, BSR) and Rosa Maria Piccione (Associate Professor, University of Turin) have secured a four-year grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for their project on Greek manuscripts in Renaissance Venice: The Library of Guillaume Pellicier and Its Contribution to Europe’s Intellectual Heritage.
The research team includes Dr Richard Gartner (Digital Librarian at the Warburg Institute and expert in metadata and digital libraries), Research Assistants Dr Dimitrios Skrekas and Dr Elisa Bianchi, consultant Pauline Van Thienem, and project administrator Dr Natalia Fantetti.
In collaboration with the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, the project aims to reconstruct, contextualise, and make accessible the library of Guillaume Pellicier—bishop and ambassador of François Ier in Venice. Pellicier’s collection, largely composed of Greek manuscripts copied during his Venetian stay (1539–42) and now housed mostly in Berlin, provides a unique lens on manuscript culture in the age of print.
The project will deepen our understanding of manuscript production during the early modern period and the age of printing, and the creation of libraries in sixteenth-century France and Italy. It will surface previously overlooked material of value to scholars, librarians, and metadata specialists, while generating a rich corpus of data and metadata in reusable, interoperable formats. The findings will result in interdisciplinary publications and engage a broad audience, including non-academic professionals and the wider public.
Follow the project
Twitter: @Pellicierbooks
Mastodon: @Pellicierbooks@sciences.social
Research blog: https://pellicierhy.hypotheses.org
