Tracing the Network: Material Evidence of the Social Lives of the Italian Translated Book

Description

Translated books are constellations of networked relations: social, intellectual, textual, visual, temporal, spatial. This paper will reflect on the traces of these relations which are inscribed in some early printed English editions of works translated from the Italian, printed between c. 1580 and c. 1620, considering the ways in which the social is written into the physical object. Particular attention will be paid to the traces of the production context(s) of these books, and the ways in which discrete elements such as type, page ornaments, woodcuts, and paratexts can speak of the network of relations which lie behind the designed page, both in the long journeys of these texts as they are translated from the printshops of Italy to England, and their local relations within the London print world. What are the constituent elements of this ‘Italian’ materiality, and how far do they map onto real-world social networks of Italian contacts?

Period	30 Mar 2022
Event title	RSA Dublin 2022: Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America
Event type	Conference
Location	DublinShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International