Presentation

Historical studies have revealed the complexity of the pathways through which university philosophical culture has taken part in the development of knowledge from the Late Middle Ages to our times. Nonetheless, till now a full class of documents has been considered only erratically: the inaugural lectures (also known as paginae) of the single university courses given from the Renaissance to the beginning of the eighteenth century. Scholars of university history know that each of the countless inaugural lectures till extant in archives and libraries is an interesting document, revealing the tenets of university culture in a specific place and time; however, few research campaigns have been conducted on these documents with the aim of improving sistematically our understanding of the history of university culture in general, or of specific trends in it. Main obstacles to these enterprises are the large number of extant documents and their dispersion. DArIL aims to facilitate scholars to overcome these difficulties, providing them with an access to a digital collection of searchable descriptions, digital photo-reproductions and codified transcriptions of paginae.

Supporting institutions: