.jpg)
The invention of printing was the technological innovation that had the greatest impact on society until more powerful media appeared in the last century. Whereas several demanding factors, as expressions of the purposes of organized groups such as the Church, universities, and merchants, pulled printing into existence in Western Europe, the earliest publishers nevertheless had to invest large resources in marketing printed books.
This seminar will focus on the ambitious strategies pushed by book producers to create a market for their new commodity. Taking into consideration the Italian market and especially Venice, the birth of trade networks and new professions as distributors and booksellers will be analyzed. The focus will be on the juridical and economic aspects of this epochal change, as they have been reconstructed by the EMoBookTrade project, a five-year research project funded by the European Research Council: https://emobooktrade.unimi.it/
Angela Nuovo is Professor of the History of the Book at the University of Milan, Italy. She has published widely on the book trade and private libraries in Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. She has been Principal Investigator of the ERC project EMoBookTrade (2016-2022), Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, University of Oxford (2012), and recipient of an Ahmanson Research Fellowship at the University of California Los Angeles (2014).
Practical information
The seminar will be organized as a hybrid event at Håndbiblioteket on the 5th floor in Niels Treschow’s hus, University of Oslo.