Reviewed by: Fabriano: City of Medieval and Renaissance Papermaking by Sylvia Rodgers Albro Agustí Nieto-Galan (bio) Fabriano: City of Medieval and Renaissance Papermaking. By Sylvia Rodgers Albro. Washington, DC, and New Castle, DE: Library of Congress and Oak Knoll Press, 2016. Pp. 240. Hardcover $95. Fabriano is an elegant, meticulous, well-documented book. It is the history of an Italian city best known as a center for technological innovation in papermaking, from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Sylvia R. Albro, senior paper conservator at the Library of Congress, offers us a brilliant, original way of writing an urban history of technology. She approaches the city itself, as a historical actor, through a detailed reconstruction of the process of papermaking: the rag trade, the maceration of pulp, the drying and sizing of paper sheets, and their polishing and packaging. After contextualizing Fabriano geographically in terms both of the availability of raw materials (mainly wood and water) and of its networks of trade, Albro describes how the city became a perfect location for European papermaking, after the technological transfer of Arabic methods to the Italian peninsula. From the late Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, Fabriano was a prominent center of innovation in papermaking and developed several new techniques in watermarking, pulp treatment, and paper sheets sizing. Even in the nineteenth century, in the times of industrial mechanization, Pietro Miliani's firm in Fabriano played an important role in the production of paper and in the continuation of the old guild tradition. Albro uses her own photographs and oral interviews with master craftsmen, archivists, conservators, and librarians, and a rich collection of old paper samples as objects of inquiry, as primary sources for historical investigation, and as technological objects offering multiple readings occurring at the intersection of the history of art, the history of technology, urban history, and Italian history. The appendixes are particularly valuable for a careful study of the physical and chemical properties—including chemical analysis—of the impressive collection of Fabriano's paper in the Special Collections at the Library of Congress. [End Page 690] Albro's meticulousness, erudition, and iconography would nevertheless have benefited from a fuller integration of this case study into a broader historiography of technology. Could the author perhaps have used Fabriano's case for further discussion—following J. Gimpel—of the technological "revolution" of the Middle Ages? To what extent did Fabriano's papermaking contribute to the making of modern Europe when compared to German cities that led mining, and metallurgy from the Middle Ages, but also in the Renaissance paper-printing revolution? What did Fabriano add to debates on the conceptual and manual skills of papermaking? A deeper discussion of these sorts of issues can be found, for instance, in Leonard Rosenband's work on papermaking in eighteenth-century France and in the context of the volume The Mindful Hand: Inquiry and Invention from the Late Renaissance to Early Industrialisation (2007), edited by Lissa Roberts, Simon Schaffer, and Peter Dear. Discussing the case of Fabriano in that context would have brought to the fore, in this instance for paper-making, the way in which philosophers and laborers worked together from the late Renaissance to early industrial times. Using the case of Pietro Miliani, the process of mechanization in papermaking might also have been integrated into a broader discussion of nineteenth-century industrial culture and the ways in which water and steam power competed and coexisted, for example in the textile industry. But these are mainly concerns for historians of technology. What is of far greater importance is the impressive way in which Albro has combined historical sources and historical narratives to produce a longue-durée, comprehensive approach to papermaking in a single city and has admirably situated this within a complex technological system of skilled workforce and expertise. The City of Medieval and Renaissance Papermaking most certainly deserves a wide readership. Agustí Nieto-Galan Agustí Nieto-Galan is a professor of history of science at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. He has written widely on the history of chemistry and natural dyestuffs, and the history of science popularization (eighteenth–twentieth centuries). Footnotes . Permission to reprint a review published here...
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Jan 2, 2021
Bankole Adéyèmi Rubain + 1
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