Reading with Voyant

Since I am working with Franciscan sermons in order to establish a connection between their attitude towards usury and the bankers' tendency to donate religious art specifically to Franciscan churches like Santa Croce, I have to read a great amount of sermons by Bernardino of Siena, St. Antony of Padua, Barnaba da Terni, Bernardino da Feltre, Cherubino da Spoleto, Giacomo della Marca and others. Though not all of them are digitized, I can still find a number of them online, and many of them are very long. Therefore, I am using Voyant as a means of splitting large sermons into world clouds and establishing whether the words that have anything to do with usury, restitution, avarice, Jews, and banking show up frequently enough in the sermon to make it relevant to my research (process depicted in the image on this page). I am currently compiling another dataset recording the names of the preachers, locations of the sermons, dates of the sermons, titles of the sermons, general topics, and the prevalent words that are related to my research with frequence of their occurrence recored in relation to the total word count. This helps me quickly filter through a great number of sermons and determine which ones may have had an impact on the Florentine bankers in 15th century and inspired them to donate art to the Franciscan churches in Florence.