Introduction

The Republic of letters

During the 15th century the increase of letter-usage and the philological establishment of the Latin language according to the classical purity, promoted the development of a cosmopolitan movement of researching and sharing knowledge. Due to these means of communication, scholars from all over Europe gave life to an ideal society based on the classical values of Humanitas (Fumaroli, 2015). The longest-lived intellectual community of the Old country, the so-called Republic of letters, rooted in this system of rhetorical and cultural values. The Italian writers, who during the 16^th century initiated one of the most remarkable phenomena of the Italian literature – namely, the production of “Libri di lettere” – referred to these values as well. Nevertheless, there are just a few critical studies on the relationship between these remarkable cultural movements and the massive production of letters in the 15^th century. The most up-to-date list of projects that use technology to catalogue, digitise, and edit letters concerning these cultural movements – list available on the E.M.L.O. project web page –, shows that none of the 84 researches in progress studies the early stages of these processes: namely, the 15^th century. The current project, started in December 2018, aims to encourage a critical review of this massive epistolary production through the creation of an online platform intended to map and catalogue letters, collect metadata, analyse prosopography and epistolary networks, and edit texts drawn from editions free from copyright and from unpublished manuscripts.