Researcher Sònia Boadas has located two volumes from the personal library of Lope de Vega, the great playwright of the Spanish Golden Age. After a meticulous search, the copies, with handwritten annotations by Lope himself, appeared in Boston and New York. Boadas followed clues in auction catalogs, historical archives, and dealer lists to find these reference works that the writer used to document his production.
Digital technology as a tool for literary archaeology 🔍
The location of these books exemplifies how philological research today relies on digitized databases of auctions and historical archives. Boadas used online catalogs and sales records to trace the provenance of the copies, which traveled five centuries from Madrid to the United States. The cross-referencing of metadata and consultation of digital repositories made it possible to reconstruct the journey of the volumes, demonstrating that current technology is an ally in recovering dispersed cultural heritage.
Lope wrote in the margins, but not like a tweeter 😅
It turns out that Lope de Vega not only scribbled plays nonstop, but also annotated his reference books as if they were a notebook. Of course, without social media to vent, the Phoenix of Wits dedicated himself to writing in the margins of his own volumes. At least his notes have served so that five centuries later a researcher could find them, while our tweets from 2012 have probably already been lost in the digital limbo.