No longer will Dante scholars or Renaissance historians have to travel across the country to consult original manuscripts. Now, from the comfort of their office or home, researchers can access these original editions on-line. The Ambrosiana Archive We are also working with Notre Dame on a project dedicated to drawings from the XVIIth century. Art historian Robert R. Coleman first began cataloguing all the images in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in 1982. Given the size of this collection, this project is no small task.
Users can search the growing corpus by limiting their query to a specific author, date, or theme.
The results of such a query would provide a variety of information for each image, including date of production, size, media, provenance, bibliography, and iconographic description. We encourage you to take a look at our home page so that you can familiarize yourself with these new databases as well as other projects now in progress. In particular, correlation between two changes in frequency does not necessarily prove that one change caused the other. But, in connection with other kinds of evidence, the correlation of word frequencies can strongly suggest that a set of linguistic changes shares a common intellectual origin. Although it's by no means an ideal tool for this sort of work, the OED's corpus of quotations has allowed me to show, for instance, that English energy and diligence are negatively correlated in this period just as their French cognates are.