The Other Eternal City: Non-Catholics in Papal Rome During the First Reformation Decade

The 1527 census of Rome, entitled the Descriptio Urbis, is the most complete accounting of Rome’s population from the first half of the sixteenth century. It is also one of the largest and most comprehensive censuses from any early modern European city. This paper presents the early stages of a project to digitize the oldest surviving Descriptio Urbis manuscript (British Library Add. Ms. 38025) as well as the published transcriptions, which draw on a variety of other manuscripts. Domenico Gnoli published a full transcription in the local history journal Archivio della Società romana di storia patria (1896). Egmont Lee revised that transcription with more authoritative manuscripts in a 1985 book. Thanks to this painstaking work, more recent scholars have been able to locate specific individuals and their households within Rome’s complex urban environment. Natalie Zemon Davis, for example, used the published transcriptions to find the famous convert al-Hasan Muhammad al-Wazzan al-Fasi cum Leo Africanus, the subject of her book Trickster Travels. Thus, the census and its transcriptions have featured in the historiography of early modern Italy for more than a century. But the transcribed forms of the census present problems for modern scholarship. Namely, they were created before the advent of Microsoft Excel and other data storage and analysis software. The transcriptions exist in hard copies and as PDFs without reliable embedded optical character recognition (OCR) data. Therefore, the transcriptions are static and do not permit researchers to generate data using their own parameters or even search keywords. Furthermore, the transcriptions contain numerous discrepancies between one another and with the manuscript. This paper presents the first stages of a project to transcribe and digitize the existing versions of the census into fully-interactive formats.