Positive Review for Litchfield’s Florence Ducal Capital

R. Burr Litchfield's e-book Florence Ducal Capital received high praise in a review published in Seventeeth-Century News (Vol. 67, Nos. 1&2; 2009-04-19), available soon via the reviews link on the title page. Reviewer Judith C. Brown writes: "The book would not yield nearly as many riches as it does if it were not an electronic book. Its ability to lead the reader digitially to the cartographic, visual, and other sources on which the book's scaffolding is built make this a new kind of book - a book which could not have been envisioned before the digital revolution and which uncovers an enormous amount of valuable information and insight as one digs into its maps, census databases, footnotes, and other electronically available information."

This title was HEB's first entirely born-digital work, for which HEB acted as the publisher. Linked to the Online Gazetteer of Sixteenth-Century Florence at Brown University, and using Brown's Online Catasto of 1427, this e-book traces the transition from republic to duchy and analyzes how new alignments of political, social and economic power had a profound impact on the physical contours of the city and hence on its artistic and cultural life, and how courtly patronage and artistic projects in turn had major influence on choices of habitation and commercial networks. This study crosses disciplinary and methodological boundaries between social history and cultural studies, while basing itself firmly on the physical fabric of Florence and its archival representations.