MoHu Projects

The SILKRAA project aims to reconstruct the dynamics of silk weavers’ migration between Italy and France during the early modern age. To achieve this, an interdisciplinary approach will be employed, combining socioeconomic history, migration studies, labor and gender studies, as well as the history of techniques and material culture.
Through the integration of macro-historical, micro-historical, and biographical reconstruction, SILKRAA aims to contribute to the revitalization of studies on migratory phenomena in the Early Modern period. Leveraging digital humanities, a comprehensive database will be created, gathering demographic data, biographical information, and visual/material evidence from Italian and French archives and museums.

Essential to the realization of the SILKRAA project is the training in Italian and international historical research methods at the Department of Historical, Geographical, and Ancient World Sciences (DiSSGeA) under the expert guidance of Prof. Andrea Caracausi. This training is complemented by collaborative efforts with Yale University (Prof. Paola Bertucci), the University Lumière Lyon2 (Prof. Manuela Martini), and the Como Silk Museum. Working closely with historians and experts, this collaboration is crucial for achieving the project’s objectives. The obtained results will not only significantly impact academic outcomes but also contribute to a more profound societal understanding.

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In recent years, scholars have increasingly focused on the study of economic inequality in preindustrial societies, aiming to elucidate the dynamics of social change within historical contexts. However, despite this burgeoning interest in inequality during preindustrial times, our understanding of intergenerational mobility, and, more broadly, social mobility within such settings, remains limited. Indeed, many questions remain unanswered.

Did the increase in economic inequalities characterizing the early modern period come with a rise in social rigidity?

Was Old Regime society truly as ossified as it has long been described?

This project aims to address this knowledge gap by focusing on the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy at the very beginning of the nineteenth century, using a novel dataset constructed from Napoleonic civil status records (Stato Civile Napoleonico). Napoleonic civil status records provides a rich and comprehensive source of information encompassing a wide array of cities, towns, and rural communities within the entirety of the Kingdom of Italy, which extended across much of northern Italy and included a portion of what is now Emilia-Romagna and Marche.

This allows us to gain a broad and diverse insight into the dynamics of social mobility in both urban and rural central-northern Italy between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a crucial period in European history as this is the time when the foundations for future economic take-off are either established or neglected.

This research will be conducted through an extensive examination of the records that collect marriage publication data (Atti di pubblicazione di matrimonio). In addition to providing fundamental demographic information (age, place of residence, any previous marriages), Napoleonic marriage publications offer extensive details regarding the occupational status of both spouses and their parents. This information will enable us to explore various aspects of social mobility and occupational structure in central-northern Italy. First, we will be able to reconstruct a detailed geography of the occupational classes of the marrying individuals across different regions, examining both continuities and discontinuities in their professional pursuits. Second, we can determine the professional intersections between spouses, shedding light on relationships and dynamics in their matrimonial strategies. Lastly, this approach will allow us to investigate intergenerational mobility, i.e., whether there were significant changes in occupation between the parents’ generation and that of their children, offering a more comprehensive picture of the social and professional dynamics of the era.

Welcome to the page dedicated to “Women’s Work in Rural Italy (1500-1800)”. Our project aims to provide a better understanding of the historical dynamics surrounding gender and work between the sixteenth and the eighteenth century in rural Italy. By incorporating diverse research methodologies and exploring various geographical contexts across the peninsula, we strive to shed light on the multifaceted nature of female participation in the pre-industrial labour force.

Previous research on proto-industrialization has suggested significant labour market participation by women, particularly in textile industries and predominantly in rural areas (Mendels 1972; Ciriacono 1983). However, female participation in the pre-industrial labour force has generally been considered marginal. As a result, even the contribution of women within the family economy has been regarded as negligible. The extensive body of research related to the theory of the ‘industrious revolution’ (de Vries 1994, 2008), for example, has posited that women’s participation in the wage labour market only became widespread in the second half of the seventeenth century, and primarily in the most developed regions of Europe. But is this truly the case? What was the actual role of women within the labour market and the family economy? Was it as marginal as long assumed? Were women solely engaged in domestic activities outside the market circuit? And were these latter roles genuinely separate from market activities?

This project seeks to address these gaps by analysing specific rural areas of the Italian peninsula between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. By employing new methodologies derived from development economics research and utilizing historical sources that go beyond traditional census and registry data, our project aims to identify the actual extent of female participation in the labour market and the family economy.

Methodologically, this project draws inspiration from the verb-oriented method studies introduced by Ogilvie (2003) and later expanded upon by Ågren (2017), as well as Whittle and Hailwood (2018). At the core of this study lies a broader concept of labour than that employed in classical and neoclassical economics. Our understanding of labour encompasses all activities necessary for household subsistence and reproduction that meet the ‘third-party criterion’ (i.e., any activity that could potentially be performed by someone else in exchange for payment). This is an important premise, since in the pre-industrial era, market and non-market activities were not always clearly distinct and often intertwined temporally and spatially.

Contemporary ethnographic studies can directly interview individuals to gather information about their daily work activities. However, such data collection was not conducted during pre-industrial times. Nevertheless, we possess numerous fragments of information about the work activities carried out by men and women in their daily lives, inadvertently provided by witnesses during criminal trials. By leveraging this qualitative information and transforming it into quantitative data using an established research methodology (Carus and Ogilvie 2009), we will be able to delineate a broad range of work activities performed by women inside and outside the home, but also inside and outside the classical labour market boundaries. This approach will not only enable a more comprehensive description of the labour market structure during the pre-industrial era but also present a fairer and more complete picture of female labour participation.

The research will be conducted through the collection of new data from various regions of the Italian peninsula, each characterized by a unique economic-social environment. Each case study will contribute to the reconstruction of a vivid and comprehensive image of the labour market in pre-industrial Italy. Specifically, the project will investigate the rural areas of the Republic of Venice, the Republic of Lucca, and the Kingdom of Naples.

Sara Abram

God’s oneness and the imminence of the “Day of Reckoning” are the most dominant subjects of the first revelations that Muḥammad, the prophet of Islām, announces to the tribes of Mecca (7^th cent.). The ultimate destiny of humanity as described by the Quran and the Sunna poses today, as well as in ancient times, questions that are by no means negligible. The project aims to frame how the vivid representations of the Universal Judgement, the pleasures of Paradise, and the torments of Hell have been assimilated and interpreted by the different intellectual currents of Islamic thought (traditionalist, theological-speculative and mystical-esoteric) to better place the perspective I intend to shed light on: the philosophical one. The interpretations of the so-called falāsifa, compared to the literal readings of the Quran and to the many Islamic “narrations” on the topic, turn out to be among the highest expressions of intellectual autonomy that the history of Islamic thought has ever known. The preliminary study of falāsifa’s conception of the soul and the hereafter – together with the identification of the ancient and late antique Greek sources that they used – will led to a better contextualization of the two case studies that I intend to analyze: the hitherto unedited Book on the Knowledge of the Hereafter by the mathematician and philosopher Abū Ḥāmid al-Isfizārī (10^th-11^th cent.) and the Treatise on the Philosophical Description of the Hereafter by the Persian physician and philosopher Abū l-Faraǧ ʿAlī ibn Hindū (d. 1029/1032).

Stefano Poggi

Between the end of the 18th century and the middle of the 19th century, a new conception of foreignness took root in Europe. Whereas before each individual coming from a different community was considered as a foreigner, with the rise of the administrative state foreignness became strictly related to belonging to a certain national community – and ultimately to citizenship.

This project aims to investigate this change by considering how Lombard-Venetian authorities regulated the foreigners’ mobility from the end of the Republic of Venice to the 1848 uprising. In order to do so, it will consider not only the conceptions and the legislation of the central élites but also local bureaucrats’ control practices of foreigner’s mobility.

Jinxiao Wang

Despite his profession as a military doctor for the Italian Navy, Ludovico Nicola di Giura (1868-1947) was known to the world as sinologist, translator, writer and traveller. This four-year research takes a global microhistory perspective to compile a biography for the figure based on his published works, manuscripts, private collection and first-hand archival sources from Italy and China. Featured with L. N. di Giura’s geographical mobility, social integration, and contribution to Sino-Italian cultural exchange, this research advances on three dimensions: 1) L. N. di Giura’s life-in-mobile, namely Medical education and travelling with the Italian Navy (1868-1900), Life in China (1900-1931) and Prefect and Mayor of Chiaromonte (1931-1947); 2) his integration into the contemporary Chinese upper class, including the various forces that guided the fate of the country and the local intellectuals; 3) his re-discovery of Chinese civilization despite being an initially ambitious “Civilizing missionary”, as well as his efforts on introducing Chinese culture and community to the Italian public with his commentaries, translation and literary creation. The study will not only bring to light a figure buried in history, but will offer a microscopic view into the history about Italy and China at the turn of the 20th century, which indeed represents a starting point for the discovery of absolute novelties in this context.

Laura Lo Presti

HuMaps explores the link between the emerging “cartographic humanities” and mobility and migration studies from a geo-visual and narratological perspective. The two-year research project has the dual objective of analytically deconstructing the imaginaries of migratory maps as well as reconstructing alternative, creative and sensitive imaginations of human mobility. These two research lines thus envisage an analysis of the cartographic narratives of the global migrant crisis to assess how maps, map-like objects and cartographic imaginaries have reproduced human migration over time – and migrated through several networks, artistic media and hybrid materials – to alternately foster feelings of hospitality and hostility towards newcomers. More importantly, HuMaps will reflect on novel applications of digital (and non-digital) mapping methodologies in the context of migration storytelling. These methodologies will be developed in collaboration with the MobiLab, as well as with the support of international scholars and partner institutions in Europe, the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada.

Despite their illusory condition of immobility, museum objects represent the meeting point of a wide bundle of itineraries, each of which has enriched them in meaning and, therefore, narrative potential through time. The mobility perspective allows us to read these itineraries and circulations as main components of the value of objects and to better understand the complexity of the role they play for their heritage communities.

Among the numerous kinds of movement that can involve museum objects, the basic one concerns the trajectories objects have followed from their production places to the collection seat itself, their main stages, the actors involved, the reasons behind them, the techniques, materials, and representations. Mobility is a defining characteristic in the life and history of objects. The point of origin of an object’s trajectory, however, coincides with the destination point of the trajectories traced by the commodity chains of its material components, and connections between unexpectedly distant places are revealed, together with the historical roots of contemporary topics like the object’s environmental and social sustainability.

Objects also trace spatial trajectories in relation to their use in different practices and places. Thinking of science and geography museum collections, for instance, instruments might have known a mobile outdoor life related to fieldwork-based research, either in specific location or widely spread. In such a context, the reconstruction of the instruments’ itineraries might allow us to compose different heritage expressions into a coherent mobility-based system, both tangible (instruments, photographs, documents, maps, etc.) and intangible (research output, practices of knowledge construction and research documentation, teaching habits, etc.). Moreover, focusing on the life of plants, botanical, and ethnobotanical collections in terms of the mobility/immobility turn means to look at their “life cycle” through a different conceptual and theoretical lens.

The meaning of objects is also frequently affected by shifts and changes. Although this can appear a metaphorical application of the mobility paradigm, such a shift in the meaning of an object is often related to its physical transfer and the consequent change of its perception and/or use by new subjects. Vice versa, sometimes the transfer itself represents the evidence of a change of significance for the person or community dealing with it.

The Covid-19 emergency is multiplying the number of museum objects involved in another kind of mobility: digitized and shared online, narrated through virtual tours and podcasts, they are moving creatively from Museum platforms to people’s digital devices and therefore potentially towards everywhere and everyone. Tracing their movements along the ramifications of the WWW would represent an extremely interesting investigation under several points of view.

Thanks to the Museum of Geography and the Botanical Garden of the University of Padova, we bring together different traditions and fields of studies, such as museum studies, history of science, historical geography, and material culture history. In our research project we aim at deepening the multilayered concepts connected to the idea of museum objects’ mobility. On the one hand, we follow different “things” through their uses, itineraries, trajectories and circulations in space and time. On the other hand, we focus on the theoretical implications connected to the general idea of mobility of objects in museums.

Urban wildness is a little explored topic because of its very nature. One reason for this neglect is to be found in urban wildness both as a dynamic concept as well as an ever-changing entity. How to study a mobile and innately undefined object? Rather than considering it merely as a forgotten space or a natural resource, this project aims to interact with urban wildness as a subject. To foster a relational approach, the project explores urban wildness going through it and involving all senses in the production of knowledge.

A preliminary part of the research will focus on the evaluation of methods and instruments of enquiry, their capabilities and limits of observing and recording this mobile subject: from fieldwork diary to photography, from audio-visual methods to performance.

Going deeper, the project will attempt to build a relationship with urban wildness inhabitants, such as plants, animals and people. It is in fact their entanglement that makes urban wildness a living, dynamic, mobile subject. Collaborative labs will be opened on the field to enquiry and enhance a collective representation of urban wildness ‘from inside it’. Finally, the project will pay special attention in the making of synesthetic artefacts, out of the multiple wildness representations archived, to disseminate this new knowledge.

The research will be developed by specific case studies, in different European cities, following the footprint of the stereotypical “nomads” that are believed to be the main inhabitants of urban wildness: the Roma. Are Roma the only living in urban wildness? Who is living on the move in contemporary cities? Is mobility a choice?

The interaction with urban wildness, in different contexts, will open new possibilities of conceiving and representing the geographies of mobility in the contemporary city, raising the issue that to live on the move mainly means a restriction on the very possibilities of movement in contemporary Europe.