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The paper examines the manuscripts and printed editions of Medieval and Humanistic works preserved in the library of Castiglione del Terziere, highlighting Bononi’s preference for writings in the historiographic genre, with specific regard to the history of Florence. Among the volumes examined – all ancient editions, incunabula and cinquecentine, extremely valuable and rare – we dwell above all on the exemplars (by Leonardo Bruni, Biondo Flavio, Iacopo Foresti) that bear Bononi’s autograph annotations, because they testify to his interest in the geographical area of Lunigiana and Dante’s biography.

The paper focuses on Andrea Caronti, an almost unknown librarian who worked at the University Library of Bologna from 1830 to 1882, author of numerous catalogues of great relevance. The paper traces his biography, based on both published and unpublished sources, and describes the most important works he carried out at the Library (above all, the author catalogue). The modernity and usefulness of Caronti’s catalogue is evident, proved by the fact that it is still used by the librarians. It should also be used to plan new (and necessary) cataloging projects for the incunabula owned by the University Library of Bologna.

The article describes the project for the survey of incunabula belonging to the Bolognese naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi. The Fifteenth-century printed editions, currently scattered within the collections of the BUB, have been identified through shelf checks and historical catalogs. The analysis and cataloging work of the incunabula started by inserting descriptions into the online catalog of SBN. All specimen data have also been recorded: marginalia, attention marks, owners, provenance, ownership notes, stamps, and binding. Noteworthy is the recent discovery of an incunabulum by Ulisse Aldrovandi, considered lost for many decades. The volume has finally returned to the massive heritage of the BUB and will undergo some conservation intervention in the coming months.

This work delves into the papers of the most significant and rare Petrarchian editions - including incunabula and cinquecentine - contained in the precious book collection of Jacopo Loris Bononi preserved in Castiglione del Terziere. It investigates the peculiar characteristics and cultural contexts that gave rise to the individual prints, the possession notes and the heterogeneous typology of annotations and marginal notes found in the volumes, opening up unprecedented scenarios of responsive readers interacting in various ways with the text.

The contribution traces an overview, necessarily partial and selective, of some valuable examples that testify to the presence of the Divine Comedy in the library of the castle of Castiglione del Terziere. From a Fourteenth-century bifolio containing passages from Purgatory to the first Foligno edition of 1472, from the first annotated and illustrated editions to some Sixteenth-century ones made unique by the presence of annotations and ex-libris, the article focuses on the peculiarities of each example, attempting where possible to reconstruct their 'movements' over time and paying particular attention also to the handwritten notes made by their last owner, Loris Jacopo Bononi.

Within the PRIN 2017 project, a reconnaissance work has been carried out from October 2020 at the Corpus Domini monastery in Bologna in order to identify how many manuscripts were still preserved by the nuns. The first results obtained confirmed the importance of the work conducted on this still unknown collection. To date, seventy manuscripts have been recollected as well as archival materials and ancient prints, including incunabula and sixteenth-century editions, which were barely known or even thought to be lost. This article aims to present the results of this first survey, with a particular focus on the manuscripts and printed books of greatest bibliological and historical interest.

The paper provides copies descriptions of two incunabula printed in Venice and preserved at Municipal Library «Fratelli Pellegrini» in Borgo a Mozzano (Lucca, Tuscany): a Divine Comedy of 1493 (ISTC ic00614000; GW online 6972) and a collection of Cicero’s works printed in the year 1500 (ISTC ic00614000; GW online 6972). Both come from the ancient library belonging to the Pellegrini, one of the most powerful families since the XVIIth century, which accumulated an extensive library and archive. The paper also focuses the attention on Prof. Francesco Maria Pellegrini (1855-1927), who engaged in a careful reordering of his family library.

Este artículo hace un cuestionamiento al significado típico del término incunable. Primero porque las fechas que lo definen no tiene un fundamento sólido. Segundo porque definirlo desde la temporalidad excluye una serie de elementos que son claves para el nacimiento y la fijación del libro. En 1982, el historiador norteamericano Robert Darnton, en su célebre artículo, extendió la historia del libro más allá del objeto ampliándola a los circuitos de la comunicación y a los diferentes agentes relacionados con su producción y usos, a saber: autores, editores, impresores, proveedores, vendedores, lectores y encuadernadores (1982). Esta revisión bibliográfica recupera otras aristas que también definen al incunable pero que han sido desatendidas e intenta abordar el nacimiento del libro desde los circuitos de la comunicación y no solo desde la temporalidad. Igualmente, reúne hechos, discusiones y definiciones que se conocen poco en el idioma español, y que permitirán a especialistas y divulgadores tener una mayor claridad sobre los libros del siglo XV = This article questions the typical meaning of the term incunabula. Firstly, because the date that defines it does not have a solid foundation. Secondly, because defining it from temporality excludes a series of elements that are key to the birth and establishment of the book. The American historian Robert Darnton, in his famous article, extended the history of the book beyond the object, extending it to communication circuits and the different agents related to its production and uses, namely: authors, publishers, printers, suppliers, sellers, readers, and bookbinders (1982). This bibliographic review recovers other aspects that also define the incunabulum but that have been neglected and attempts to address the birth of the book from the circuits of communication and not only from temporality. Likewise, it brings together facts, discussions and definitions that are little known in the Spanish language, and that will allow specialists and communicators to have greater clarity about the books of the 15th century.

Traditionally, it has been considered that the Ptolemaic or classical maps from the four editions of Ptolemy’s Geography published in Rome (1478, 1490, 1507, and 1508) are apparently indistinguishable at first glance because they have been printed from the same plates. This poses a problem for antiquarians, collectors, and curators who wish to accurately date their copies. Recently, two very comprehensive articles have been published on the different paper watermarks associated with each edition, which would allow for the correct identification of each one. However, there are occasions when the maps do not display watermarks. This article aims to provide some keys to distinguish between the incunabula editions (1478, 1490) and those of 1507–1508 in cases of the absence of watermarks. In this process of detecting differences, we have used digitized images of the maps. The results show small modifications in the copper plates made between the editions of 1490 and 1507/08. Our findings reveal that seven previously unknown reworked maps have been identified.

Submitted to the Journal of Data Mining and Digital Humanities, and accepted. Pending last revisions. Please cite: @article{gille_levenson_2023_towards, author = {Gille Levenson, Matthias}, date = {2023}, journaltitle = {Journal of Data Mining and Digital Humanities}, doi = {10.5281/zenodo.7387376}, editor = {Pinche, Ariane and Stokes, Peter}, issuetitle = {Special Issue: Historical documents and automatic text recognition}, title = {Towards a general open dataset and models for late medieval Castilian text recognition (HTR/OCR)}, note = {Accepted, to be published.} } GILLE LEVENSON , Matthias, « Towards a general open dataset and models for late medieval Castilian text recognition (HTR/OCR) », Journal of Data Mining and Digital Humanities (2023) : Special Issue : Historical documents and automatic text recognition, eds. Ariane PINCHE and Peter STOKES, DOI : 10.5281/zenodo.7387376. Link to the data: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7386489

In 1862, José Bonilla Ruiz, the librarian of the University of Salamanca, developed a catalogue of the incunabula held by the University Library, but that work was never published. Although he had done this work partially on his own initiative, it was linked to other tasks he was carrying out in the Library, like quantifying collections, writing new bibliographic descriptions and working out new indexes. His work reveals an early attempt to describe the incunabula included in a collection, with innovative features, like copy details. On the other hand, this catalogue does not take into account the bibliographical tradition on incunabula which had developed since the Repertorium by Ludwig Hain. Likewise, the study of this catalogue and the comparison with the incunabula currently held by the University show that three of the copies described by Bonilla disappeared on an unknown date.

The article examines the history of the first three printed editions of Dante’s Commedia (1472; Foligno, Mantua, and Iesi/Venice), analyzing their respective vicissitudes from a socio-economic perspective. Specifically, through a joint analysis of the relevant academic literature, the local socio-economic history, and the material provenances recorded within numerous copies, the essay intends to highlight to what degree and form commercial events such as regional fairs influenced the development and distribution of typographic products in Italy in the 1470s.

The paper traces the events that led to the publication of the Catalogus historico-criticus Romanarum editionum saeculi XV – which the Dominican Giovanni Battista Audiffredi published in the context of the dispute with the French Francois-Xavier Laire and his essay on Roman typography – through the correspondence between the librarian of the Casanatense Library and the Augustinian Tommaso Verani. At the same time, the paper offers a picture of the erudite studies conducted by Verani and of the reorganizations he carried out in the archives and libraries of the Observant Congregation of Lombardy, activities that allowed him to come into contact with some of the greatest intellectuals of the Italian 18th century.

The essay outlines the state of knowledge on Francesco Griffo from Bologna and presents new and valuable archival evidences found in the State Archive of Padua. The already known documents are combined with the significant set of recently discovered papers, in order to investigate the decade that Griffo spent in Padua, a city that was crucial for his biographical and professional career. There he came as a goldsmith, attracted by the artistic fervor that surrounded the Basilica of Saint Anthony, and there Griffo made the gradual transition to the engraving of printing types, working for some of the protagonists of the early printing and establishing professional relationships that would prove decisive for his future, in Venice and elsewhere.

The essay offers a critical rereading of one of the most famous works by Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, published in 1936. The interpretation of printing proposed by the German philosopher, also if not referring to the fifteenth century, allows to shed new light on some cultural phenomena aroused in the early modern Europe by Gutenberg's invention. The opposition between the authenticity of the work of art (manuscript) and its reproduced equivalent (incunabulum), as well as the new «exhibition» of the printed book, allow us to better understand the forms of distrust or even rejection of printing by contemporaries. In the same way, Benjamin helps to understand the early segmentation of the printed book market divided in two opposite poles: the strenuous defense of the «aura» and the birth of popular publishing.

The use of punctuation in German incunabula is often described as arbitrary, irregular, and unsystematic (cf. Masalon 2014: 54–56). This concerns the inventory, frequency, and function of punctuation marks as well as pragmatic aspects such as how typesetters treated punctuation in their respective target texts. In this paper, punctuation is not seen as an independent linguistic subsystem, but as a means of text segmentation that – along with other measures (e. g. capital letters, pilcrows, and white space) – was used to structure a text with respect to its formal appearance, helping the reader to decode information. This case study is based on a corpus of German pamphlets written by the Bohemian astrologer Wenzel Faber and printed annually beginning in 1481 at various print shops, principally in Leipzig and Nuremberg. The analysis finds significant changes in the editions before and after 1490. These changes include an increasing consistency in the intensity of text segmentation, and a use of capital letters and punctuation marks developed from a polyfunctional to a monofunctional approach. Finally, different types of text segmentation are proposed, each characterized by a specific relationship between its frequency and its function. Despite this overall tendency, one must still take into account that typesetters followed individual punctuation practices in their search for suitable forms of text segmentation.

In the 15th century, at a time when codification via dictionaries and grammars had not yet taken effect, printers, editors, and compositors were already producing pamphlets and books that had to meet the new requirements of the letterpress, especially as regards the arrangement of white space and uniform line justification (even-margined on the left and right). The following analysis investigates five German editions of the Mirabilia Romae (Marvels of the City of Rome), a well-known pilgrim guide, all printed in 1500 for the contemporaneous Jubilee year and thus for short-term sale. The results show that compositors used different means for text alignment: In addition to deviations in line counts and the repositioning of lines, they chose extended or contracted spelling variants, predominantly on the second half of the page. The most frequent variants are abbreviations in the form of tildes. However, just a few spelling patterns with tildes were used. With respect to explanatory processes in a historical perspective, the results call for a closer consideration of page format, text layout (mise-en-page) and line justification when evaluating spelling variation in early book printing.

In our time of increasing reliance on digital media the history of the book has a special role to play in studying the codex form and the persistence of old media alongside the growth of new ones. As a contribution to recent work on the continued use of manuscript in the handpress era, I focus on some examples of manuscripts copied from printed books in the Rylands Library and discuss the motivations for making them. Some of these manuscripts were luxury items signalling wealth and prestige, others were made for practical reasons – to own a copy of a book that was hard to buy, or a copy that could be customized in the process of copying. The act of copying itself was also considered to have devotional and/or pedagogical value.

The paper presents the discoveries about a Venetian incunable studied during the cataloguing activities of incunables at the Regional Library in Catania (2018-2021). The aim of the paper is to inform the academic community about the crediting of the illuminations to the Maestro dei Putti; this results from a collaboration with Lilian Armstrong, professor of Art at Wellesley College, MA and specialist on Venetian Renaissance Book Illumination. This identification enriches the census of incunables with another copy, illuminated by the artist who was active between Venice and Padua in the 70s of XV century.

Study of the Cancionero de Ramón de Llavia (86*RL), one of the first collective incunabula cancioneros. We analyse the factors which Ramón de Llavia, compiler and publisher, took into an account in order to select the texts of the anthology: addressee, subject, and relation to the poems of other incunabula cancioneros. We also present variants and variations of texts regarding the incunabulum printed tradition.

The article seeks to examine the book collection which Tommaso Giustiniani (1477-1528) brought with him in Holy Hermitage (Eremo) of Camaldoli from Venice when the Venetian nobleman became a Camaldolese monk in 1510 with the name of Paolo. The research of the volumes (27 incunabula and 12 16th century editions) with his ownership note “Thomae Iustiniani et amicorum”, gathered before his religious vocation, demonstrates the development and new attitudes of his personal interests. His studying interests modified between the period as a student at the University of Padua and his following staying in Venice, illustrating the raise of his religious reflection before his entry in Camaldoli.

The history of the printed book in Africa is a relatively new line of inquiry. One of the most challenging issues confronting its practitioners will be to produce authoritative and comprehensive records of the national output of African countries, an essential prerequisite before venturing into more complex analysis. In this panorama, Eritrea and Ethiopia seem to represent two happy exceptions: the pioneering work of Ḫǝruy Wäldä Śǝllase, Stephen Wright’s Ethiopian Incunabula and then the supplements by Stefan Strelcyn, Osvaldo Raineri, and Kibrom Tseggai have allowed for the reconstruction of large sections of the print production of the two countries. This article maps out the cultural and political context in which the attention for Ethiopian incunabula emerged and traces the stages of the collective effort that has allowed the preservation of the traces of the early printed documentation in Eritrea and Ethiopia. The article argues that there are still significant margins of improvement in the retrospective coverage of the history of the printed book in Africa, especially since the arrival of digital technologies and the Internet that have offered a very effective set of tools for solving some of the problems that have plagued African retrospective national bibliographies since their inception.

The following notice is the first draft description of the incunable, the famous Peregrinatio in terram sanctam, written by German nobleman, cathedral dean and politician in the Electorate of Mainz, Bernhard von Breidenbach, which had been discovered in the April 2020 in the library of St Joseph of Volokolamsk Monastery. This example is a German translation into early modern standard German dialect. By the comparison of the discovered book with the digital images of the editions of 1486 (Peter Schöffer of Mainz) and circa 1500 (Peter Drach of Speyer) collected in the European libraries it was identified as one of the copies printed circa 1500. Digitized copies are available in Bayerische Staatsbibliothek und Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel.

This article makes a comparative analyses of the Caffa's description in the manuscripts of Hans Schiltberger’s essay and incunabula. Here were reviewed the Heidelberg’s, Baden’s, and Munich’s manuscripts from the late 15th century, and also three Augsburg’s editions from 1476—1477, 1480, and 1486 years. The author proposed the discrepancies, post adjustment, have established priorities of first incunabula in relation to manuscripts, directly ascent to not preserved autograph. Here specify also Caffa’s status as the capital of the Black Sea, which recorded Schiltberger, also urban microstructure, in particular, allocating the grain of the city (urbs, castrum), surrounded by the castl’s wall, four burgs (burgus), separated by the second fortress’s wall, and the suburb (antiburgus). Here define six religious communities in Caffa, which were highlighted by Bavarian observer. Was critically examined quantified data of Schiltberger about Caffa.

This article provides an introduction to, and an English translation of, the Latin funeral oration written by Nikolaus, the bishop of Modruš (or Nicholas de Korto), on the occasion of Cardinal Pietro Riario’s death in January 1474. The article opens with a contextualizing introduction to the oration, its author, and its subject, as well as the contemporary late-fifteenth-century trend in publishing funeral orations. Following this introduction is an English translation from, and comparison with, Neven Jovanović’s openaccess, peer-reviewed Latin transcription (Croatiae Auctores Latini) and the British Library’s copy of the oration (ISTC No. in000488000), which was first printed in Rome in 1474 by Antonio and Raffaele Volterrano.

The text examines some incunabula now in the Biblioteca Universitaria in Cagliari and their ex libris, which belong to the library collection of Giulio Salinero (1574-1612), a lawyer born in Savona, and also to the Dominican Convent of Savona. These books, formerly part of the Simon collection, settled in in Alghero, and of the Library of the Piarist Order in Cagliari, were given to the Biblioteca Universitaria in the second half of XIX century. They relate to the antiquarian interests growing in Sardinia between the end of XVIIth and the beginning of XVIIIth century.

The text examines some incunabula now in the Biblioteca Universitaria in Cagliari and their ex libris, which belong to the library collection of Giulio Salinero (1574-1612), a lawyer born in Savona, and also to the Dominican Convent of Savona. These books, formerly part of the Simon collection, settled in in Alghero, and of the Library of the Piarist Order in Cagliari, were given to the Biblioteca Universitaria in the second half of XIX century. They relate to the antiquarian interests growing in Sardinia between the end of XVIIth and the beginning of XVIIIth century.

The text examines some incunabula now in the Biblioteca Universitaria in Cagliari and their ex libris, which belong to the library collection of Giulio Salinero (1574-1612), a lawyer born in Savona, and also to the Dominican Convent of Savona. These books, formerly part of the Simon collection, settled in in Alghero, and of the Library of the Piarist Order in Cagliari, were given to the Biblioteca Universitaria in the second half of XIX century. They relate to the antiquarian interests growing in Sardinia between the end of XVIIth and the beginning of XVIIIth century.

The text examines some incunabula now in the Biblioteca Universitaria in Cagliari and their ex libris, which belong to the library collection of Giulio Salinero (1574-1612), a lawyer born in Savona, and also to the Dominican Convent of Savona. These books, formerly part of the Simon collection, settled in in Alghero, and of the Library of the Piarist Order in Cagliari, were given to the Biblioteca Universitaria in the second half of XIX century. They relate to the antiquarian interests growing in Sardinia between the end of XVIIth and the beginning of XVIIIth century.

This study focuses on the application of a multi-analytical approach combining image processing techniques, imaging studies and material characterisation of a French late fifteen-early sixteen century incunabulum – the BPE, Inc.438. The first study goal was to verify the potential of computational methods in NIR imaging to retrieve accurate reconstructions of the engraving printings by Germain Hardouyn. For this aspect, two representative scenes were chosen: Trinity, f.8r; Saint Anthony the Abbot, f.61v. The applied methodology allowed faster creation of digital reconstructions while the material analysis proved the use of azurite, malachite, vermilion, lead white and ochres, and their NIR response was assessed in the context of the digital processing. The second goal was to make a comparison between chosen illuminations and engraved references of the same representations from two incunabula of the British Library, unravelling the illuminator’s intentional iconographic alteration based on visual and theological criteria.

Incunabula are considered a particularly important part of the documentary heritage. 520 incunabula are preserved in eight different Lithuanian memory institutions. The engagement of Lithuanian libraries in the development of the international database of incunabula provenances, Material Evidence in Incunabula (MEI: https://data.cerl.org/mei/_search), intensified research on incunabulistics, as it led to a closer examination of the marks of the former owners. The article presents the latest data on the distribution of incunabula in different Lithuanian memory institutions, as well as analyzes various book marks that were not recorded in Nojus Feigelmanas’ catalog of Lithuanian incunabula or was revised and supplemented, and evaluates their significance in the printed book culture of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The analysis is performed using the provenance method, however is not limited to property marks, but also includes margins – marks left by a reader on the pages of books, and other marks not related to property or reading, providing significant information on book history, culture and peculiarities of reading at that time. In the 15th century, there were no printing houses in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, so the main spread of books was by trade. The entries with prices identified in the incunabula reveal a relatively early time of purchase of the incunabula and testify that the books in the 16th-17th centuries were an expensive commodity. They usually mention groschen, the common currency in the territory of Lithuania-Poland, less often – florins or ducats. In this case, the large variety of prices does not allow to draw more specific conclusions on the prices of incunabula in the relevant period, but these data as a source of book history will serve in general when studying the value of the old books and the circumstances of their acquisition. Purchase records usually also provide information about a former owner of a book. The article focuses more on lesser-known owners on whom new information has been found or existing data have been updated, attention is also paid to female donators. The article also discusses the records left by the incunabula rubricators, which allows to determine the period of the book entry into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, as well as to look at them as one of the first readers. Various inscriptions left by anonymous owners require the most effort. Entries of the 15th-16th centuries, mostly in Latin, many of which are abstracts of an existing book or notes on it, additions to the text, are still awaiting detailed reading and research. Identified Lithuanian words will be a valuable source of the language history for researchers of the old Lithuanian language. Various marginalia – reviews on a book, notes from everyday life, counting the year of the book, as well as graffiti, different drawings that can be seen as feather attempts, amateur illustrations, caricatures or even as an expression of reading boredom, will be an important material to describe a reader’s relationship to the book at the time, for which the incunabula, like books of other ages, were not only the object of study or research, but also a kind of notebook for important thoughts, synopses, everyday details.

Европейская графика, как и все изобразительное искусство, всегда стремилась к станковости, к максимальному освобождению от пут прикладничества (Вильям Моррис с его идеями внедрения искусства в промышленность – редкое исключение). Станковая графика в Европе так и называется «Freigraphik», то есть свободная, вольная графика. Русское искусство, напротив, долго оставалось в рамках восточных традиций декоративной двухмерности. Только после реформ патриарха Никона русское изобразительное искусство бросилось догонять «западный прогресс», давно устремившийся к веризму и фотографии. Именно плоскостной подоплекой русской графики и объясняется популярность в России гравюры на дереве. Ксилография, даже репродукционная, имитировавшая в XIX веке фотографическую трехмерность, упрямо вцепившись в плоскость листа, не давала разыграться духу станковости. Начало XX века вернуло ксилографию на плоскость листа, а эстетику репродукционной гравюры сочло безнадежным анахронизмом. Художник – гравер или резчик, столкнувшийся с технологическими особенностями гравирования на дереве, поневоле умнеет как художник, выбирая оптимальный путь достижения цветовой и линейной выразительности. Европейское книгопечатание целиком обязано гравюре на дереве. Подвижные литеры суть маленькие гравюры на дереве, ныне отливаемые в металле, но бывшие когда-то вырезаемы на единой доске. Еще один пример упрямого устремления ксилографии к утилитарности – это попытка уже в XVI веке употреблять ее как репродукцию живописи. В статье упоминается об изобретении кьяроскуро Уго да Карпи. Следует обратить внимание на то, что именно прикладники – ювелиры, витражисты и архитекторы XVI века широко использовали ксилографию как средство репродуцирования и широкой популяризации своих идей и изобретений. Удивительно, что эти гравюры-чертежи в наше время воспринимаются как чисто станковые произведения. Многие из авторов этих гравюр упомянуты в публикации. Художники нашего времени заметили, что гравированная или нарезанная доска гораздо красивее оттиска с нее. Это явление натолкнуло на мысль украшать громадными ксилографиями интерьеры. Так ксилография вторглась в архитектуру. В этом и состоит парадокс: ксилография большого формата, казалась бы, должна быть идеально станковой, но нет, она сохраняет за собой функции прикладничества.

This is an analysis of the trajectory of one of the two great families of our Medieval and Renaissance flos sanctorum. This family is formed of three works: the handwritten Compilación B (an abridged version of the Legenda aurea of Iacopo da Varazze), the Flos Sanctorum con sus ethimologías (an incunabulum of unknown date and printer) and the Leyenda de los santos, a work that thrived with several editions published since the end of the 15th century until 1579. This article explores the relationship between these three works and also analyses the specific affiliation of their principal manuscript copies and editions, concluding with how the texts have evolved from these first manuscript versions to their later printed forms.

This article studies the role of the earliest books printed in the Dutch vernacular in the religious practice of lay individuals and the devout home. Many of the texts disseminated in these early printed books have received little attention and scholars have tended to view them within the sphere of the Modern Devotion, even though often there is no direct link to this religious reform movement. This article attempts to show that the first books printed in Dutch offer an interesting lens through which to study domestic devotion in the Low Countries in the last decades of the fifteenth century. It argues that these books bridged the gap between catechetical instruction and the private home, literally bringing home many of the ideals and instructions that the clergy would have offered in church and thus increasingly ‘textualizing’ the lives of the late medieval laity. Printers such as Gerard Leeu and his contemporaries acquainted Christians to the use of printed books for personal and practical religious instruction and knowledge and thus paved the way for developments in the sixteenth century.

From typographical, documentary and historical points of departure, this article deals with a printed pamphlet in the archives of the House of Alba which contains the transcription of the letter confirming the privileges accorded to Christopher Columbus by the Catholic Monarchs in the Capitulations of Santa Fe. Whilst the text and the historical event that it derives from are both well known, here for the first time the attempt is made to identify the typography of this document, which hitherto has only rarely been referred to. As a result, its status as an incunable or post-incunable is rejected and its publication is related to the progress of the so-called Columbus lawsuits, which were to play such an important role in the history and development of legal proceedings.

This paper, that relies on the Hortus sanitatis’ example, takes stock of early printed books’ bibliographical description and enhancement. Different countries first tried, separately, to make printed catalogues, and, little by little, they all used the STC system. Later, they began to computerize the catalogues, and they first used the MARC system, and, now, the MARC-TEI system. At the same time, libraries try to digitize incunabula, but this must be done in such a way as to allow scientific research, patrimonial uses and cultural enhancement.

Valentin et Orson fut publié d’abord à Lyon (1489, 1495), puis à Paris (ca 1511-1519). Le but de cet article est double: vérifier si le passage d’un centre éditorial à l’autre a impliqué une évolution du texte; montrer l’intérêt d’une collation systématique sur plusieurs éditions, même plus tardives, afin d’établir une édition critique.Valentin et Orson was first published in Lyon (1489, 1495), then in Paris (ca 1511-1519). This article has two aims: first, to establish whether the transfer from the former to the latter editorial centre brought with some kind of evolution of the text; second, to prove how interesting a systematic collation of many editions can be, in establishing a critical edition.

This paper examines soine distinctive uses of typefaces by Caxton's compositors in his early products at Westminster and illustrates how useful such examples are in revealing the chronology of actual book production, as well as in identifying the compositors at work on individual volumes. An exhaustive analysis of early printed books can provide us with information about compositors at work in England's earliest printing house. This paper therefore argues that it is inost definitely worth considering such 'inechaiiical' aspects of book design as typography when editing any printed text, and introduces most recent research results contributed by a project at Keio University, which airns to establish a semiautomatic system that can transcribe every feature of the printed text including even minute differences in types.

This article describes recent research on the textual relationship between the first and second editions of the Canterbury Tales printed in England by William Caxton and it also explores the textual affiliations of the manuscript source for the corrections in the second edition. Using both computerised and manual methods the variant readings between the first and second editions of the Tales are isolated. Examples of the textual affiliations of the manuscript source of Caxton's second edition are analysed. This article concludes that the manuscript source for the corrections introduced in Caxton's second edition of the Tales was of the same quality as tlie best extant manuscripts and that its readings can help our understanding of the textual tradition and can clarify the text for editors of the Tales.

O Regimento proueytoso contra ha pestenença e o Modus curandi cum balsamo são provavelmente os primeiros textos impressos em Portugal referentes à prevenção e ao tratamento de doenças. Sua autoria e contexto histórico são discutidos em outros artigos desta revista. Destacamos algumas questões relativas ao 'discurso médico' presente nesses textos, contrastando-os com outros do século XVIII. Os autores setecentistas escolhidos são dois portugueses, Luiz Gomes Ferreyra e João Curvo Semmedo, e um inglês, John Huxham, autor de Tratado sobre as febres, que inclui extensa discussão sobre a varíola, a 'pestilência' do século XVIII na Europa. Estas obras, escritas nos primórdios da 'medicina científica', representam, a nosso ver, uma ponte entre os textos medievais/renascentistas e os compêndios médicos atuais. Permitem apontar questões relevantes para a discussão das orientações terapêuticas e dos critérios diagnósticos presentes nos documentos.Regimento proueytoso contra ha pestenença and Modus curandi cum balsamo are probably the first texts addressing the prevention and treatment of diseases to be printed in Portugal. Their authorship and historical context are discussed elsewhere in this journal. Here we would like to raise some questions concerning the 'medical discourse' found in the texts and compare these with others from the eighteenth century. The authors chosen for the sake of comparison are two Portuguese-Luiz Gomes Ferreyra and João Curvo Semmedo - and one Englishman, John Huxham, author of An Essay on Fevers, which includes a lengthy discussion of smallpox, Europe's eighteenth-century 'plague'. It is our belief that these works, written in the early days of 'scientific medicine', represent a bridge between medieval/Renaissance texts and current medical compendia. They allow us to raise questions about the therapeutic indications and diagnostic criteria found in the documents.

Printed books of hours, the best-seller of the late medieval trade in books, provide evidence of an information revolution equal to that occasioned by the Internet today. The Grey Collection of the National Library in Cape Town possesses eight books of hours, printed between 1498 and 1530, and they are almost completely unknown. Yet these valuable incunabula, all of them printed on vellum with hand-painted initials, and some of them with hand-painted miniatures, are of importance to anybody interested in books, the history of the book, the dissemination of information, the art of the late 15th to the early 16th centuries and early printing. They are also religious books, and of value to people interested in that discipline. The books are therefore eminently suitable as subjects for transdisciplinary research through which the subjects of history, sociology, art and religion can be drawn together. Two of these books, printed by Thielman Kerver in Paris, are discussed in detail in this article. The books are especially remarkable for their many illustrations that include pictures around the borders of each page as well as full-page illustrations. The pictures are neither metal cuts nor woodcuts, as were usual in that period, but relief prints. The most important part of the texts is a sequence of prayers to the Virgin Mary. Soon after these books were printed , in 1571, Pope Pius V prohibited the use of all existing books of hours.

Five books printed in Toulouse at the end of the fifteenth century are illustrated with woodcuts. This note seeks to present their iconographic program and suggests a number of hypotheses as regards the nature of these images

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The Illustrated Incunable Short Title Catalog on CD-ROM (IISTC), now in its second edition, provides an unrivaled wealth of information on fifteenth-century printing and, as a computer database, allows for rapid searching that would not be possible with printed reference works. However, the database's search interface suffers from numerous problems, as Paul Needham described in a thorough review essay. This article presents a solution to those problems that can be implemented by the end user, and also shows what kind of useful information can be obtained from the IISTC by doing so. The solution entails exporting all records to a very large text file, analyzing the file with scripts written in Perl, importing the information into a full-featured database application, and conducting queries with the database application's more robust and better documented interface. With the IISTC data directly accessible, the database fields can be manipulated to implement features missing in the original IISTC, including separate fields for each part of the imprint data and a count of recorded copies. Query-generated output demonstrated here include a table of incunables with the highest number of copies recorded in the IISTC; printers of Ulm, the number of their signed editions, and their dates; and the number of signed editions printed each year through the end of the fifteenth century. Sample scripts for recreating the results described here, as well as instructions for implementing them and a discussion of points to consider when doing so, are found in the appendices.

By applying social network analysis, we study how the printing world became an economic activity in which scholars and printers were associated. We follow the chronology and temporality of this construction, often overlooked in previous research. Thanks to data contained in the Incunabula Short Title Catalog, we see that two networks of Venetian publishers grew up between 1469 and 1500. The first allows us to observe the construction of a pool of scholars. The second permits delving further into the notions of centrality and authority in this new social and economic universe. In Venetian printing presses, scholars and printers supported each other at first. The names of important humanists lent legitimacy and prestige to the new entrepreneurs. With time, however, the names of scholars in Venetian editions being more numerous also meant that the balance of power was more to their disadvantage. The authors’ prestige became more diffuse, also due to the number of editions that mentioned two or more contemporary authors at the same time. Some authors however, managed to take advantage of this phenomenon, as the example of Antonio Mancinelli shows. These editorial networks, analyzed in diachronic perspective, give us the opportunity to study printing not only as a revolutionary invention which suddenly transformed European society, but also as a cultural industry in the making.