This volume deals with the De Bry collection of voyages, one of the most monumental publications of Early Modern Europe. It analyzes the textual and iconographic changes the De Bry publishing family made to travel accounts describing Asia, Africa and America.

This work offers a series of linked studies of European print culture in the sixteenth century, focusing particularly on France and the regional, provincial experience of print. France, in the sixteenth century, was one of the great centres of the European publishing industry. But in the second half of the century the established dominance of Paris and Lyon was increasingly challenged by other new printing centres, stimulated in part by the religious and political crisis of the French Wars of Religion. Drawing on the data collected by the St Andrews French book project, the author...

It has become commonplace in recent decades for scholars to identify in the books of the Scottish Enlightenment the intellectual origins of the modern world, but little attention has yet been paid to its impact on contemporary readers. Drawing on a range of innovatory methodologies associated with the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of the history of reading, this book explores the reception of books by David Hume, Adam Smith, William Robertson and Thomas Reid (amongst many others), assessing their impact on the lives, beliefs and habits of mind of readers across the social scale. In the...

During recent decades much has been written about early modern book distribution, but until now Norway has been absent from the discussion. Drawing on book listings, this study seeks to fill this lacuna by exploring the market for books in early modern Norway. Its approach is multifaceted: consideration of the types of books accessed by different elements of Norwegian society is set alongside developments within the book market itself, such as the extended life of popular books, the gradual replacement of Latin by the vernacular and the rise in the eighteenth century in the number of books...

Despite surging interest in early modern pamphlets, political historians of the Dutch Republic, arguably the frontrunner in pamphleteering, have yet to explore their nature and relevance in depth. Rather than treating pamphlets as reflecting public opinion, or dismissing them as political froth, this volume aims to understand pamphlets as political actors in their own right. The articles focus on the function of a pamphlet, the pamphlet as a political actor, and the relationship between pamphlets and public opinion. Articles deal with these questions systematically while chronologically...

Books printed in the fifteenth century have been the subject of much in-depth research. In contrast, the beginning of the sixteenth century has not attracted the same scholarly interest. This volume brings together studies that charter the development of printing and bookselling throughout Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It presents new research and analysis on the impact of the Reformation, on how texts were transmitted and on the complex relationships that affected the production and sale of books. The result is a wide-ranging reappraisal of a vital period in the...

This volume presents significant new research on several aspects of the late mediaeval and early modern Bible. These essays consider aspects of Bible scholarship and translation, illustration and production, its uses for lay devotion and in theological controversy. Inquiring into the ways in which scholars gave new forms to their Bibles and their readers received their work, this book considers the contribution of key figures like Castellio, Bibliander and Tremellius, Piscator and Calov, the exegetical controversies between centres of Reformed learning and among the theologians of the...

Despite the fact that, if only by number, small and peripheral cities played an important role in fifteenth and sixteenth-century European print culture, book history has mainly been dominated by monographs on individual big book centres. Through a number of specific case studies, which deploy a variety of methods and a wide range of sources, this volume seeks to enhance our understanding of printing and the book trade in small and peripheral European cities in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and to emphasize the necessity of new research for the study of print culture in such cities.

This work offers the first English-language survey of the book industry in Renaissance Italy. Whereas traditional accounts of the book in the Renaissance celebrate authors and literary achievement, this study examines the nuts and bolts of a rapidly expanding trade that built on existing economic practices while developing new mechanisms in response to political and religious realities. Approaching the book trade from the perspective of its publishers and booksellers, this archive-based account ranges across family ambitions and warehouse fires to publishers' petitions and convivial bookshop...

Cheap print moved across Europe in surprising ways, crossing unusual distances by unusual routes and by unusual means. Pedlars, news, and cheap print defy the conventional categories and models of distribution: we need to think about their extraordinary diversity, and about the means by which their unstable cultural images inflect distribution. Books were not dead things, and the examination of Italy, the Netherlands and Britain, three regions that contain instructive parallels and contrasts, reveals their unpredictable liveliness. This collection of essays, which emerges from transnational...