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Wissen über Gott und Engel, über Winde und Meteore, über Grammatik und Rhetorik, Informationen darüber, wie man eine Harfe baut, die einen zum Einschlafen bringt, aber auch darüber, wie man böse Geister bändigt, finden sich in den über hundert Publikationen, die unter dem Namen Johann Jacob Wecker (1528-1586/88) in vier Sprachen bis in die Mitte des 18. Jahrhunderts erschienen sind. Um dieses vielfältige Wissen zu versammeln, wurde kompiliert – es wurde aus Bestehendem Neues hergestellt. Für die Praktik der Kompilation war ein Netzwerk von Menschen, aber auch von Dingen unabdingbar; ohne deren Zusammenspiel wäre eine so vielfältige und vielfache Buchproduktion nicht möglich gewesen. Um derart viele Bücher publizieren zu können, war nicht nur das Kompilieren bedeutsam, sondern auch das Übersetzen und Auskoppeln von Teilen zwecks Herstellung neuer Bücher. Das Machen von Büchern aus Büchern bildete die Grundlage des Erfolgs dieser Publikationen, die in der Forschung bislang kaum Beachtung fanden.

In this work Craig Kallendorf argues that the printing press played a crucial, and previously unrecognized, role in the reception of the Roman poet Virgil in the Renaissance. Using a new methodology developed at the Humboldt University in Berlin, Printing Virgil shows that the press established which commentaries were disseminated, provided signals for how the Virgilian translations were to be interpreted, shaped the discussion about the authenticity of the minor poems attributed to Virgil, and inserted this material into larger censorship concerns. The editions that were printed during this period transformed Virgil into a poet who could fit into Renaissance culture, but they also determined which aspects of his work could become visible at that time.

Bringing together a broad range of case studies written by a team of international scholars, this Concise Companion establishes how manuscripts and printed books met the needs of two different approaches to literacy in the early modern period. Features essays illustrating the particular ways a manuscript and a printed book reflect the different emphases of an elite, private and an egalitarian, public culture, both of which account for the literary achievements of the Renaissance Includes wide-ranging essays, from printing the Gospels in Arabic to a contemporary reconceptualization of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus Increases accessibility through a rubric organized around archival and manuscript studies; the provenance of texts and the authority of editions; and studies of genre, religion and literary history Announces the recovery of archival documents, which in some instances are over four hundred years old Places translations of Milton's Latin, Greek, and Italian alongside the original texts to increase accessibility for a wide audience of students and scholars Provides an invaluable platform for highlighting on-going attention to the history of the book and its corollary subjects of reading and writing practices in the 1500s and 1600s