Furnace and Fugue
by Tara Nummedal, Professor of History, and Donna Bilak, Independent Scholar
Furnace and Fugue: A Digital Edition of Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugiens (1618) with Scholarly Commentary brings to life in digital form an enigmatic seventeenth-century text, Michael Maier’s alchemical emblem book Atalanta fugiens. This intriguing and complex text reinterprets Ovid’s legend of Atalanta as an alchemical allegory in a series of fifty emblems, each of which contains text, image, and a musical score for three voices. Re-rendering Maier’s multimedia masterpiece as an enhanced and interactive digital scholarly work, Furnace and Fugue allows readers to hear, see, manipulate, and investigate Atalanta fugiens in ways that were perhaps imagined when it was composed but were simply impossible to realize in full before now. Whether through interactive visualizations of modern notation or a multifunctional space that allows users to curate, save, and share their own selection and arrangement of Maier’s emblems, Furnace and Fugue makes possible the capabilities implied by this early modern book with digital tools and features that also clarify and/or advance the arguments of the eight scholarly essays included in the work. Furnace and Fugue has been published by University of Virginia Press as part of the distinguished academic series Studies in Early Modern German History.
Winner of the 2022 Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Creativity in Digital History by the American Historical Association
Learn more about the authors: Tara Nummedal and Donna Bilak.
Read an interview with four of the project’s key collaborators on how they developed and published Furnace and Fugue.
The process of creating Furnace and Fugue felt like an experiment in process and form, which made it both exciting and sometimes also disorienting as we felt our way towards the final project. One of the biggest differences between publishing Furnace and Fugue and a typical print book was the central role from the very outset of editors, technologists, and designers. These experts always play a crucial role in creating academic books, of course, but most authors only work with them at the end, once the book is mostly written and in press. Because Furnace and Fugue was a digital publication, however, much of this team was in place from the very beginning, making their expertise and contributions much more visible to the authors and performers and creating space for real collaboration.
Supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and, at Brown University, the Office of the Vice President for Research and the Social Science Research Institute
