I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.
--Umberto Eco
Established in July 2022 in Vercelli (Italy), Videntes: A Multispectral Imaging Collective includes four scholars whose academic training varies from History and Literature, to Art History and Digital Humanities. Our teaching and professional service includes secondary and higher education, libraries and special collections, and collaborations with international project-based teams. Our name, Videntes (Latin, plural for the act of seeing), is evocative of our commitment to seeing together; to looking across disciplinary boundaries and historical chronologies, and to bringing attention to the medieval processes used to make handmade books (manuscripts) and the modern technologies that can be applied to those books and their places of use, such as multispectral imaging or photogrammetry. By seeing together we recover things lost, or unseen, and illuminate what mattered about an object in the past, argue what should matter to the present, and imagine what could matter for the future. In summer 2023 Videntes will return to Vercelli to work in collaboration with Dr. Silvia Faccin, segratario and conservator of manuscripts for the Museo del Tesoro del Duomo e Archivio Capitolare.
VidentesMSI [at] gmail [dot] com
