Parochial Archive Project in Rome

Parochial Archive Project

Much of the history of art focuses on a single artist’s life or on works of art only. With the Parochial Archive housed at the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome (KNIR) we can broaden that scope toward the historical and social context and at the same time maintain important biographical details. At the same time, this kind of material can nowadays be researched with new methods that allow for a deeper understanding of the social dynamics of foreign communities in early modern Rome.

The Parochial Archive Project is a unique historical resource that has been worked on for over the last five decades. This paper based archive contains handwritten and typewritten transcripts of Dutch and Flemish (plus some German) nationals who lived in Rome from the 1550s until roughly the 1700s. At present, this corpus of archival transcripts is, at its most, a reference work that contains data about engravers, painters, sculptors, etc. on a detailed micro-level.

For almost forty years Elisja Schulte van Kessel has worked on the Parochial Archive Project, together with fellow researchers. During the period of her affiliation to the Royal Netherlands Institute she visited 130 Roman parishes to search through their records for fiammenghi. The denominator fiammenghi was predominantly used for the Dutch and Flemish inhabitants of Rome. The sources were transcribed from handwritten documents as physical records, not digital, so they still require transcription to be used digitally. The sources are written in French, Italian and Latin and interspersed with Dutch scribbles.

Schulte van Kessel and her assistants carefully transcribed each baptism, marriage, and death record and each stato dell’anima when a fiamengo was named. The latter, the stati dell’anime, is a record comparable to a modern-day census. Not only painters are named in this archive but also a plethora of other artisans are documented, such as bakers, goldsmiths, masons, and shoemakers.

While keeping the micro-level information intact we would like to bring all the data together in an online accessible Linked Open Database. The project’s goal is to offer historians the opportunity to pose new research questions on a macro-level while maintaining all of the micro-level details. This new way of aggregating and visualizing data will help to deepen our understanding of how the Dutch and Flemish community in Rome functioned, and how artists and artisans were connected to one another in both their private and professional lives.

With the rich corpus we can add a social hierarchical layer to the Dutch and Flemish presence, see how fiammenghi integrated within the Roman society, rediscover forgotten names, and reconstruct important artisanal studios. Many of these social historical research questions have not been touched upon since the mid-1940s, have never been adequately studied or need to be revised.

With the Parochial Archive Project as a crowdsourcing transcription project the KNIR intends to convert these transcripts into usable and freely re-usable data that will be accessible via a Linked Open Database. The database will help present and future researchers trace the contours of the larger Dutch and Flemish community in Rome. This, in turn, is one of the main research goals of the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome.

We would like to thank you very kindly for your help. Without you (!), and we really would like to emphasize this, it would not be possible to open this extensive archive. Information acquired for over four decades would, quite literally, slowly fade away.

The three main goals of this project are:

1. To enrich the Linked Open Database with the transcribed data of the crowdsourcing transcription project.
   a. Provide end-users with a view of the data on a macro-level while maintaining all of the micro-level details and with the goal to pose new research questions.
   b. Provide end-users with data that can be freely re-used and/or enriched.
2. Gain important insights into how the Dutch and Flemish community in Rome functioned during the period from 1550 until 1700.
3. And many other unforeseen positive research outcomes of digitizing and opening up an archive.

If you want to take part in this project and start transcribing please navigate to classify (see the bar located at the top of your screen).

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The Royal Netherlands Institute Rome (KNIR) is the oldest and largest Dutch academic institute abroad. The institute is a center of expertise in the humanities with a strong profile of interdisciplinary research and teaching. For more than a century the KNIR has been committed to esteemed research and interdisciplinary education in the humanities, and served as a bridge between Dutch universities and the academic world in Italy.