Di Nepi, Serena

Senior Fellow: June 2022

Research Project: The Sceptical Administration: Bureaucracy, Translations, and Otherness in Early Modern Records. A Case Study on the Roman Ghetto

This project focuses on early modern transcultural polyglossia from a social history perspective. It addresses the making of basic documentation in polylinguistic societies by focusing on the cultural agency of the professionals and clients involved in the process. It will work on the translation skills requested from notaries in multiple circumstances by arguing that this communication system should be reframed under the methodological approach of scepticism. On these bases, this project will assume the writer’s conscious intervention in the making of official documentation in multilinguistic recording contexts, as the Roman Jewish community was at the time. It will investigate the autonomous agency of the writers in the service of the Kehilla, who were in charge of guaranteeing the validity of the documentation—and therefore that of the documented action—by focusing on their daily duties and doubts in different times. The main sources will be the registers of the community, synagogues, and brotherhoods. Documentary linguistic choices were never neutral and imply a continuous and problematic dialectic of identity, otherness, and religious belongings that is still to be researched, where the sceptical approach offers a unique way of rebalancing classical reasonings and methodologies.

Serena Di Nepi is a professor of early modern history at Sapienza Universitá di Roma.