Suchergebnisse

this article explores the likelihood that early modern printers had de-veloped rudimentary practices aimed at assessing their market of refer-ence to pursue strategic commercial planning. It surreys the inner evi-dence of a single manuscript bibliographic compiled by a minor mem-ber of the Giunta publishing house active in Venice in order to pro-pose the hypothesis that said catalogue may have been instrumental to commercial bibliometrics aimed to avoid harmful competition between redundant editions within the same market area.

This open access volume focuses on the cultural background of the pivotal transformations of scientific knowledge in the early modern period. It investigates the rich edition history of Johannes de Sacrobosco's Tractatus de sphaera, by far the most widely disseminated textbook on geocentric cosmology, from the unique standpoint of the many printers, publishers, and booksellers who steered this text from manuscript to print culture, and in doing so transformed it into an established platform of scientific learning. The corpus, constituted of 359 different editions featuring Sacrobosco's treatise on cosmology and astronomy printed between 1472 and 1650, represents the scientific European shared knowledge concerned with the cosmological worldview of the early modern period until far after the publication of Copernicus' De revolutionibus orbium coelestium in 1543. The contributions to this volume show how the academic book trade influenced the process of homogenization of scientific knowledge. They also describe the material infrastructure through which such knowledge was disseminated, and thus define the premises for the foundation of modern scientific communities.

This work provides an in-depth description of the juridical framework in which the Italian book trade operated during the Renaissance. It is a multi-authored work that discusses issues related to intellectual, literary and artistic proto-property by taking into account some of the main urban centers of pre-unitary Italy such as Venice, Milan and Rome. It investigates the different legal systems put in place by the states and the dynamics that generated around them. The volume frames the topic at task within the general discourse on technologic innovation and state patronage in economic history hence exploring patenting systems (e.g., Florence and Venice) along with book privilege systems (e.g., Milan and Venice). In so doing it also investigates instances of conflicting interests occuring between the political and the economic sphere (e.g., Rome and Venice).

The EMoBookTrade project, funded by the European Research Council and directed by Angela Nuovo, has developed a database on book prices (ca. 1530-1630) and book privileges (Venice, 1469 to 1603). This web application shows that digital humanities can play an innovative role in historical research at the same time respecting traditional scientific methods and the needs of ground-breaking inter-disciplinary research. Indeed, the EMoBookTrade DB takes into account both the representation of different kinds of sources and the processing of data deriving from them. Therefore, thanks to a rigorously designed conceptual model, the front end allows for a simple and straightforward source and data representation together with a complex search engine, the results of which can be downloaded in a CSV format suitable for statistical analyses. This article also aims to propose an ontology of price setting and privilege grants, considered as events concerned with the history of the book and the economic history.