Print Culture in Renaissance Italy: The Editor and the Vernacular Text, 1470-1600

Description

The emergence of print in late fifteenth-century Italy gave a crucial new importance to the editors of texts, who determined the form in which texts from the Middle Ages would be read, and who could strongly influence the interpretation and status of texts by adding introductory material or commentary. Brian Richardson here examines the Renaissance circulation and reception of works by earlier writers including Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio and Ariosto, as well as popular contemporary works of entertainment. In so doing he sheds light on the impact of the new printing and editing methods on Renaissance culture, including the standardisation of vernacular Italian and its spread to new readers and writers, the establishment of new standards in textual criticism, and the increasing rivalry between the two cities on which this study is chiefly focused, Venice and Florence.

"Richardson's book is interesting and timely on a subject practically unknown and only partially understood." Annali d'italianistica "The editing and printing of the Latin and Greek classics has long been recognized as one of the glories of the Italian Renaissance, and scholars have duly studied the phenomenon...the book is original and welcome...Overall, Richardson has written an informative and very well-researched book that adds a good deal to our knowledge of printing and publishing in the Italian Renaissance." Paul Grendler, American Historical Review "This most carefully researched book, the first study in English of the role of the editor of Italian vernacular texts in the sixteenth century, wiill prove highly valuable to historians of early printing, of the book as a material object, and of the Italian language and its first canonical authors as well as to bibliographers and bibliophiles interested in the various editions of Petrarch, Boccaccio, Dante, and Ariosto that were published in the first century of printing." Modern Philology "This exceedingly rich book documents the growing importance of the editor or correctore of vernacular texts in (late) fifteenth and sixteenth-century Venice and Florence...This book is essential reading for Renaissance Scholars...it documents an exciting time in the history of western culture and provides an excellent reminder that all printed texts are the product of delicate negotiations between the integrity of the text and the needs of the reader." John Mulryan, Cithara