The project envisages a study of 17th-century collections of Italian lyric poetry, to be examined in connection with the cultural communities in which they were produced and used.

The research focuses on two main cores, one for each year.

The first one includes the extensive collection of data through the census, gathering, cataloguing and itemization of both single- and multi-authored collections. Cataloguing will rely on an existing tool, the Lyra database (Univ. Lausanne). The census and itemization will be carried out collectively by all research units through the recruitment of young scholars and by providing research training to a group of collaborators. The Lyra Content Management System will be aligned to the requirements of the 17th-century corpus: in particular, updates will be introduced in order to convey the structure of collections more effectively and to allow for the creation of categories and subjects, also with a view to a stronger collaboration of national and international research groups. The 17th-cent. corpus will thus be integrated with earlier corpuses, enabling search across a vast database and the study of the different configurations of collections through the centuries. For each collection, cataloguing will highlight structure, sections, the presence of paratexts and additional elements, the subject-matter of poems, their dedicatees, metre and incipit.

The second core concerns the study of the data collected in the first year, examined against the lines of development traced in recent studies and projects. Rather than on language and style, research will focus on the cultural communities that gravitate around collections of poetry and are ultimately reflected in them. The connections with historical contexts and social occasions, both private and public, will be investigated through an integrated study of the collaborators involved in the construction of collections: authors, editors, printers, patrons and dedicatees. The aim is to consider lyric collections from a new angle and in a wide-ranging perspective, moving beyond individual case studies.

The dissemination of research, in its turn, will be twofold. On the one hand, the writing of essays dedicated to little-known or unknown collections will be accompanied by the publication of an annotated anthology of 17th-century lyric poetry, addressed to a wide readership (from university students to the educated reader) and designed to reflect the project’s innovative focus on cultural communities, rather than thematic or aesthetic choices. On the other hand, the gradual populating of Lyra will combine with the creation of a new website, which will showcase the descriptions of collections and especially of the relevant cultural communities through a more user-friendly interface; such website will be built on criteria aimed at facilitating its use in a variety of educational contexts (secondary-school students, university students, and school teachers).

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