Led by professor R Sweets (University of Leicester), the project is funded by the Leverhulme Trust (Research Project grant, 2020-24). It is centered on the understudied interest for Spain and Portugal shown by British travellers between the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century. Well known today for his books on the topography of Rome and on Pompei, prepared by visits on site documented by his notebooks, the antiquarian and topographer William Gell (1777-1836) visited Spain and Portugal in 1808 and 1810, during the Peninsula war. The main source of the project is one of the six notebooks of owned by the British School at Rome, documenting his journey in the Iberian Peninsula.
Professor Raphaële Mouren, Head of the department, and Beatrice Gelosia, Deputy Librarian, are working on the project with the help of our IT consultants, EmmeBiSoft; the BSR Department of Research Collections acts as a Co-investigator, and has developed the digital facets of the project. As part of the Spain and Portugal project, the BSR Research Collections is preparing the online edition of the transcription of the Spain and Portugal notebook, prepared by Dr Richard Ansell, Research Associate to the project. The full-page sketches in the notebook are described separately.
We have updated our research projects platform that hosts a lot of material on Gell: a research essay written by professor Sweets, a presentation of the six notebooks, to which the department has added a bibliography, the representation of maps of Rome by William Gell, and the digital facsimile of Gell’s notebook on Northern England and Scotland with a detailed description of all images.
https://researchprojects.bsr.ac.uk/s/william-gell/page/welcome
