Social:ENBaCH

ENBaCH - European Network for Baroque Cultural Heritage – is a research project promoted and funded by the European Commission through its Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Eight Universities, from six European countries, participate in the network: Universitat de Barcelona, Technische Universität Dresden, the Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-Universität Greifswald, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales - Paris, Università di Roma La Sapienza, Università di Teramo, Uniwersytet Warszawski, Medizinische Universität Wien.

Goals

ENBaCH’s goal is to overcome the “grand narratives” of traditional historiography and reconstruct the lives of European peoples—with their different political, religious, and cultural histories—as the result of contacts, exchanges, mutual influences, rivalries, challenges, and conflicts. The 17th century was indeed an age of intense mobility, and it was preceded and accompanied by important migrations of people as well as artifacts and ideas, which contributed to the formation of an interconnected and self-reflective cultural heritage. International trade, circulation of scholars, artists, craftsmen and a regular postal system unified Europe and helped disseminate the innovations of the Renaissance to the continent’s peripheries. The local political and cultural communities within which people, artifacts, and ideas had to be integrated did not simply accept or refuse these innovations, but responded actively, using the same materials to create new original configurations. They also reacted against such innovations, giving rise to inventive local styles through differentiation. Assimilation and differentiation thus represented the two sides of the same coin in a history of multiple encounters, exchanges, rivalries, and collaborations.

Current state of the project

To reach its goals ENBaCH is currently developing an on-line portal with a double task: on one side, the portal will serve as an interactive repository of documents and information on the Baroque period; on the other side, it will help us disseminate the results of the research conducted by the nine institutions involved in the program. One of the challenges of this model is to develop a virtual meeting place between historical research and cultural tourism, a place where scholars can put their scientific expertise in the service of a wider audience. It has become almost a refrain that historians are unable to communicate with people outside academia. Our goal is to bridge this gap and allow anyone who uses the web to benefit from our work in the form of texts, images, films, sounds etc.

Portal contents

In its current form, the portal contains:

• A Library of more than 2.200 fully accessible on-line early modern books;
• An interactive map of baroque Rome highlighting noteworthy artistic, literary, musical, cultural and diplomatic sites, together with a collection of related and largely unedited documents;
• A collection of Polish visual poems;
• A pilot project on the relationship between religion and politics based on Text Encoding Initiative;
• A section on baroque images of the body, including photographs of anatomical waxes and related early modern texts;
• A collection of bibliographies and essays on different topics;
• A list of links to other websites and portals also interested in the Baroque age;
• A Research notebook for current information on ENBaCH activities and related topics.

An important collection of documents from the House of Medici stored in the Medici Archive in Florence and the Odescalchi, or Erba-Odescalchi, Archive in Rome will soon be added. The portal will also include the digital catalogues of three exhibitions, which are being organized by Barcelona (Under the shadows of the Vesuvium – The Viceroys of Naples), Dresden and Wien, and the outline of two tourist circuits on the Baltic area and the Spanish-ruled Italian territories (Lombardy, Naples, Sicily and Sardinia).

Future Developments

In the future ENBaCH will continue to develop the existing sections mentioned above on the circulation of authors and performers as well as ideas and products. By authors and performers we mean artists, musicians, men of letters, philosophers, scholars, scientists and the like, together with specialized workers who were employed in any of these disciplinary fields. This part of the project will emphasize the circulation of stylistic patterns through books and prints as well as performance practices – be they musical, theatrical or even rhetorical and political – for the circulation of ideas, styles, and fashions.

Kit of the young historian

ENBaCH also plans to develop the “Kit of the young historian”, an educational tool directed to secondary school students and teachers to support the learning and teaching of baroque history in a laboratory-style environment. Teaching/learning history in a laboratory-style environment means to acquire the skills for “reading” the past, while discovering the “rules” of the “historical game” and the language and categories that historians employ to create history. The portal will offer an on-line repository of lessons on specific topics, accompanied by bibliographical tools and primary sources, spanning from figurative artifacts, documents and images, to collections of historical events, personages, timelines, contemporary books, pamphlets, etc. Users will be able to surf, collect and assemble such materials, following the direction of their research projects, and thus acquiring both historical knowledge and a deeper understanding of historical approaches and methodologies. To be fully successful the Kit requires that IT technicians work closely together to select the most suitable materials, present them in the most efficient way, and test new disciplinary and technological tools with a panel of students. The Kit will thus achieve its fundamental goal of enabling users to learn by doing.

References

ENBaCH European Network for Baroque Cultural Heritage, Rome, La Sapienza, 2009