BRIAN RICHARDSON, Manuscript Culture in Renaissance Italy.

Abstract

AS early as 1977, in his introduction to the Italian translation of Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin’s L’apparition du livre,1 Armando Petrucci underlined how, contrary to accepted opinion, the arrival of printing did not by any means spell an end to manuscript production. On the contrary, ‘up to the beginning of the sixteenth century, manuscripts and printed books should not be seen as two distinct phenomena but rather as two aspects of the same process of cultural production and distribution, to be differentiated not so much by their technical means of manufacture as by the type of text they reproduced and therefore by the type of readership they wanted their products to reach’. In recent decades this subject has been tackled on several occasions: new and more wide-ranging research has shown that the transition between the two systems of production was a slow process, undermining the simplistic view that the printing revolution managed over the course of a few years to sweep away centuries of a consolidated tradition of manuscript transmission. Working also from the point of view of the new material object itself, the printed book, it has been shown how much this owed to manuscript antecedents and how slowly and hesitantly its own formal autonomy as a product developed.2