Click here to join the workshop online
Location: P.A. Munchs hus: Seminarrom 9
Printing privileges were a cornerstone of the early modern printing business, serving not only as a transferable form of capital and investment mechanism, but also as a cultural currency that conferred prestige on particular projects. While there has been extensive research on large jurisdictions - such as France or the Holy Roman Empire - there is a significant gap in our understanding of privileges that applied only at the “local” level. This includes cities within larger jurisdictions, regional entities (such as the Duchy of Lorraine or the Electorate of Brandenburg), and colonial jurisdictions (such as Mexico or Peru). This workshop aims to fill this gap.
The purpose of the workshop is to initiate a discussion about printing privileges in lesser known or smaller jurisdictions. We ask potential workshop participants to share their knowledge of these privilege systems and to present them to a wider audience. Possible guiding questions include
- How did local systems of printing privileges work? How did they evolve over time?
- To whom were privileges granted, and what types of authors or printers were involved?
- What was the purpose of these privileges? For example, were they more a mark of prestige or more important as economic assets on the local print market (e.g., university or town printers)?
- Were privileges more often granted for original works or for works that had been privileged elsewhere? What was the duration of the privileges? What do we know about practices of renewal, inherence, transferability?
By exploring these questions, the workshop aims to shed light on printing privileges of relatively limited scope, and to understand the importance of local printing centres in a wider context.
Programme:
Friday, 13 September 2024
9:45-10:00: Informal gathering, coffee @ P.A. Munchs hus: Seminarrom 9
Session I: Chair: Nana Citron
10:00-10:30: Marius Buning: Before Copyright: An introduction to the project
10:30-11:00: Tobias Schenk: Imperial Printing Privileges. Archival sources, methodological approaches and future perspectives
11:00-11:30: Jesper Jakobsen: Printers and printing privileges in eighteenth-century Altona
11:30-11:45: Break
Session II: Chair: Saskia Limbach
11:45-12:15: Philip Haas: Official printing and its printers. Administrative printing in the Principality of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel and the role of the court printers <online>
12:15-12:45: Xevi Camprubi: Printing Privileges in Early Modern Catalonia: a Special Case within the Hispanic Monarchy <online>
12:45-13:30: Lunch
13:30-14:00: Alessandra Panzanelli Fratoni: Privileges & Legal Texts. A proposal for an integrated approach using the platform IVS Commune online <online>
14:30-15:15: General discussion on the way forward, with a presentation of the BE4COPY database by Alberto Campillo Pardo, Andrea Ottone, and Théo Fraslin.
15:15-15:45: Break
15:45-16:45: Book launch of Andrea Ottone Censura, commercio e privilegi librari a Roma: Il caso di Alessandro Prestino (1596) (FrancoAngeli: Milan, 2024) with comments and introduction by Alberto Campillo Pardo.
