The Falconieri Database

This platform comprises the digital edition of a corpus of some 430 letters sent to the Roman nobleman Ottavio Falconieri between 1655 and 1675, the large majority of which were written by the Florentine prince and cardinal Leopoldo de’ Medici. The letters are still unknown to scholars and the general public: they have always been in the hands of private owners and until now no one has had the opportunity to study them or even to see them. The Falconieri Project is generously funded by the Medici Archive Project’s board member Dr Howard C. Yang. Since 2015 the letters are housed in his private library, the Fengjiang Library in Shanghai. Every letter has a database record including not only the transcription of the text but also all the relevant metadata related to the document: sender, recipient, date, synopsis, relevant people, places, and topics. Every document record also includes one or more digitized images of the document. The database is also provided with biographical records for all the people mentioned in the documents.