If you want to know what was it like to live in the Florence of 1400, to discover how the monks of Novacella Monastery begun to produce wine or to trace the development of a public institution, you\u2019ve got to\u00a0go back to their documents<\/strong>. Texts like chronicles, memories and biographies as well as statutes, inventories, sales contracts represent the so-called\u00a0primary sources<\/strong>\u00a0and provide a wealth of information about the events and the life of a place in time.<\/p>\n To help us in this search, we can now take advantage of the huge collection of work done by scholars in 18th and 19th centuries: learned men who gathered, edited and published all the primary sources they could find. Such efforts led to a new approach to the study of history based on primary sources. In Italy, the main actor in 1700 was\u00a0Lodovico Muratori<\/a>.<\/p>\n Born in 1672,\u00a0Muratori<\/strong>\u00a0was a clergyman with degrees in Philosophy and Law. He was employed by the Estensi Family, Dukes of Modena, as librarian and archivist with the special duty of finding useful documents to justify the territorial expansion of the family. This research gave Muratori the inspiration to widen this perspective – developing the attempts made more than one century before by Machiavelli and Guicciardini – of establishing a systematic approach towards the collection of documents supporting historiography that eventually led to the birth of National Histories, such as the\u00a0Monumenta Germaniae Historica<\/a>\u00a0in Germany. His first\u00a0masterpiece<\/strong>\u00a0was the\u00a0Rerum Italicarum Scriptores<\/em><\/a>:<\/em>\u00a0a publication of 25 volumes which portrayed the history of Italy through its chronicles. The publication was sustained by the fundraising of a dedicated society. Here we find the major historians of medieval Italy like\u00a0Giovanni Villani<\/a>, author of the\u00a0Historia Universalis<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Dino Compagni<\/a>, as well as less known or even anonymous texts, that often are the only sources to trace the past of a territory.<\/p>\n Muratori was a tireless man. As soon as he had completed that work in 1738, he started the\u00a0Antiquitates Italicae Medii Aevi<\/em>, another huge collection of primary sources showing the\u00a0customs and practices of Medieval Italy:<\/strong>\u00a0–\u00a0its institutions – the role of women – the development of its language – the rules of justice – everyday things like clothing, jobs, markets, sports. Thanks to Muratori, we can now easily read thousands of documents from the 5th to the 15th centuries, preserved in public and ecclesiastical archives spread throughout Italy. And all that without having to decipher handwritten personal writings!<\/p>\n On Europeana, you can find other precious primary sources for Italian history (as well as for other Countries), not included in Muratori\u2019s work, edited by other erudites such as\u00a0Antonio Caracciolo<\/a>\u00a0(XVI cent.),\u00a0Giovanni Battista Caruso<\/a>\u00a0(XVII-XVIII cent.),\u00a0Antonio Chiusole<\/a>\u00a0(XVII-XVIII cent.),\u00a0Stefano Borgia<\/a>\u00a0(XVIII cent.),\u00a0Lorenzo Giustiniani<\/a>\u00a0(XVIII cent.) and many more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"