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Women in the Book Trade in Italy, 1475-1620*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Deborah Parker
Deborah Parker*
Affiliation:
University of Virginia
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Extract

in his 1569 Epistola qua ad multas multorum amicorum respondet de suae typographiae statu nominatimque de suo thesauro linguae graecae, the Parisian printer Henri II Estienne decries the participation of women in the book trade: “But beyond all those evils which have now been brought on by the ignorance of printers, male and female (for this only remains to add to the disgrace of the art, that even the little ladies have been practicing it), who will doubt that new evils are daily to be expected?” As Estienne's comments testify, one of the most unusualfeatures of the Renaissance and Counter Reformation book trade was the existence of several women printers and publishers. While their contemporaries were well aware of the presence of women in the printing profession, bibliographers and historians have largely neglected the history of their labors.

Type
Studies
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 49 , Issue 3 , Autumn 1996 , pp. 509 - 541
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1996

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Footnotes

*

Research for this article was made possible by grants from the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Villa I Tatti, Florence, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and the University of Virginia and University of Rome Scholar Exchange Program. I am grateful to the staffs of the Archivio di Stato, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Biblioteca Riccardiana, and Biblioteca Moreniana in Florence; the Biblioteca Angelica, Biblioteca Casanatense, and Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale Vittorio Emanuele in Rome; and the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice for their courtesy and assistance. I would like to thank Conor Fahy, Paul Grendler, and Martin Lowry for their comments on an earlier draft of this study. I am also indebted to Gino Corti for his advice on the transcription of these documents. All translations are mine.

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