Dr Stefano Jossa, Reader in Italian, has been awarded a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant to study the Ridolfi Collection in Royal Holloway's archives. This is one of the most important collections of letters from the Italian Renaissance owned by a British university library.

Detail from a letter in the Ridolfi Collection

Almost unknown to the public and scholars, the collection comprises letters from members of the Ridolfi family and people linked to it, and provides a unique insight into an Italian Renaissance family that included a Cardinal, Niccolò, as well as Roberto Ridolfi, who became famous for having plotted against Elizabeth I in 1571. The Ridolfi letters are relevant to both Renaissance scholarship and Anglo-Italian studies, offering an extraordinary case-study for Renaissance family history. Dr Jossa's project aims to produce a commented edition of the corpus and reconstruct the history of a Renaissance family, in preparation for a larger project including a hypertext edition. Family history and social network analysis will frame the methodological background of the research.

Find out more about Royal Holloway's archival collection here.