From printshop to piazza: the dissemination of cheap print in sixteenth century Venice
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This thesis is concerned with the smallest and cheapest products of the Venetian
presses in the sixteenth century. Pamphlets and printed fliers were the most accessible
articles of printed matter to the wider public, and they are crucial to understanding how the
technology of printing infiltrated the urban life of Venice in this period. To this end, Chapter
One is concerned with the spaces of print dissemination in the city, mapping information
about the locations of presses, bookshops, and stalls in the city. A particular focus is the
street trade in cheap print, how this interacted with established shops and was drawn to
particular times and spaces of public gathering. Chapters Two and Three consider the chief
producers and disseminators of cheap print: printers and publishers, and vendors both
established and itinerant. I examine the people who came to make up the printing industry in
this developmental phase, and the role that the production of cheap print played in the
process of establishing a successful business. A focus on performers who published or sold
cheap print-enacting the oral dissemination of texts in tandem with their printed
diffusion-suggests how broader publics, of every shade from illiterate to literate, were
becoming acculturated to an expanding print culture. Chapter Four then concentrates on
representative examples of printed pamphlets produced in Venice by itinerant publishers
and performers in collaboration with members of the local printing industry, for example,
tales of chivalry, poems about recent wars, charlatans' recipes, and prognostications.
Finally, in Chapter Five I consider how cheap print dissemination fared in the intensifying
climate of control and censorship of the Counter-Reformation era.
Authors
Salzberg, RosaCollections
- Theses [4223]