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In the book Giordano Bruno: His Life and Thought, by Dorothea Waley Singer, references often have a form of

18 Doc. Ven. XV.

or

49 Docc. Rom. XX, XXI.

How to decipher them?

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2  
Unless you already know what documents these notes refer to, it's anybody's guess. Doc will be Documentum, Docc Documenta. Ven. could be Venetianum/-a, Rom. Romanum/-a. The Arabic numerals could be page numbers, the Roman numerals document numbers. But there is really no way to tell: the author ought to at least give you the full name of the documents in the first note in which he refers to them: perhaps you could search for the first reference to these documents in the book. Or in the bibliography/appendix. – Cerberus Oct 21 '12 at 16:38
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The OP is looking at the book online, and the bibliography is not online. My advice would be to check the print edition. – MετάEd Oct 21 '12 at 16:44
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I see the folks at History.SE weren't much help either. I'd suggest 1)look in other books on the subject, particularly those published before 1950 2)look for a Renaissance History forum with reasonably high-powered academics. But these references may be peculiar to Singer. – StoneyB Oct 21 '12 at 18:19
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@Cerberus The author does not give a full first reference, unless "Doc. Rom. I [Spampanato, Documenti della vita di Giordano Bruno, p. 154]" identifies Docc.Rom. But the footnotes to Ch. 1 are confusing. See especially n.1 – StoneyB Oct 21 '12 at 18:23
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Hello Suzan and welcome. Reading your question I infer, with some degree of sureness, that you might be interested to follow our new proposal Italian Language & Usage. I like Giordano Bruno, and I was happy to ear that someone in the world is studying his opera. Congratulations. However, FWIW, I agree with MetaEd: there is no way to correctly answer to your question without consulting the print edition. Furthermore, apart this problem, I think the question, albeit interesting (+1), is too localized as per the FAQs. – Carlo_R. Oct 21 '12 at 18:31
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closed as too localized by Carlo_R., tchrist, StoneyB, MετάEd, kiamlaluno Oct 22 '12 at 21:48

This question is unlikely to help any future visitors; it is only relevant to a small geographic area, a specific moment in time, or an extraordinarily narrow situation that is not generally applicable to the worldwide audience of the internet. For help making this question more broadly applicable, see the FAQ.

1 Answer

up vote 7 down vote accepted

In 1933, Vicenzo Spampanato published many documents on the life of Bruno under the title Documenti della vita di Giordano Bruno.

He divided these documents into the Documenti Veneti and the Documenti Romani, and numbered each document with a Roman numeral. Docc stands for the plural Documenti.

So Docc. Rom. XX, XXI. means documents XX and XXI from the Documenti Romani.

Vincenzo Spampanato, Documenti della vita di Giordano Bruno, Opuscoli Filosofici IV (Florence 1933)

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Perfect! Isn't this a historical question, eh? :) – Suzan Cioc Oct 21 '12 at 19:29
P.S. 49 and 18 are just Singer's footnote numbers. – Suzan Cioc Oct 21 '12 at 19:30
For what it's worth, here's the earlier, 1921, edition, which has fewer documents. Vol I, Vol II. Documenti start on page 599, in Vol II, and there are a bunch more sections than just Roman and Venetian. What goes before that is the Life itself. But Cerberus nailed it. – StoneyB Oct 21 '12 at 19:40
@StoneyB Pardon, may I ask you if with the verb 'nail' you mean 'To accomplish (a task) completely and successfully'? – Carlo_R. Oct 21 '12 at 19:49
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@tchrist: You're saying it as if it were a normal thing to do... – Cerberus Oct 21 '12 at 20:41
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