Research Project “Communities of Print in Early Modern Europe”

Abstract

The paper discusses the international multidisciplinary research project “Communities of Print:Using Books in Early Modern Europe”, launched by Manchester Metropolitan University (UK) in 2016. The project united the leading scholars specialising in art history, early modern history and literary studies, as well as librarians and archivists. The project “Communities of Print” explores early modern books not just as a medium for distributing information, but as material objects of Renaissance visual culture and art. It focuses on the visual and social impact of the books on various communities and examines their usage in communal settings. The paper also briefly outlines the presentations made at the first conference organised within the project in June 2016 in Manchester. They concerned such topics as the public availability of monastic and private libraries in early modern culture, book trading networks in Europe, the attribution of ownership marks and annotations,usage of medieval manuscripts and their role in early modern book collections, reading practices and access to printed material, and the evolution of anti-Catholic imagery in the early modern Protestant print. Finally, the paper observes some implications of the project, which stem from the close cooperation of researchers of art, history, literature and practitioners — librarians and archivists, — such as refining the knowledge and understanding of early modern books as the objects of visual culture.