ABSTRACT
The Medici Archive Project (MAP) was founded in the early 1990s to foster the study of the Mediceo del Principato, the epistolary collection of the Medici Grand Dukes, dating from 1537 to 1743. At the same time, the Mediceo del Principato also records the personal vicissitudes of the Medici themselves and the events at their court. In order to facilitate access to the content of the Mediceo del Principato, MAP hired scholars and postdoctoral fellows to enter transcriptions and synopses of these documents into a Microsoft Access database, which was accessible only at MAP’s headquarters, located at the Archivio di Stato. The prominent role played in early modern studies by BIA enabled MAP to pursue a variety of focused scholarly endeavors which transformed a small academic start-up into a fully fledged research institute. Each document transcribed and contextualized in BIA was entered according to one or more material culture topic categories, which were determined at the inception of the project.
