Abstract
Reviewed by: Alexandra Bamji, University of Leeds, UK
Venice has long been recognized as one of the most important centres of information, communication and printing in the Renaissance world. This astute study sheds new light on the role of print in urban culture by focusing on the production, distribution and regulation of items like pamphlets, fliers and broadsheets. For Salzberg, ‘cheapness’ is the defining characteristic of this material, above its ubiquity, materiality, literary merits or intended market. The low cost of ‘cheap print’ was related to its small physical form. Produced in large quantities, it generated a sense of community amongst its readers, in contrast to the intimacy of manuscript communication. In Chapter 1, Salzberg argues that this material began to be recognized as a distinct category of print over the course of the sixteenth century, perceived by some to be of low material worth and limited intellectual significance. Nonetheless, the widespread diffusion of texts fuelled anxieties that print was uncontrollable and potentially disruptive. Social commentators expressed concerns about the limited education of printers, errors in texts and the pursuit of profit. The ubiquity of cheap print is underlined in Chapter 2, which locates cheap print in the streets and public spaces of Venice, as well as in the city’s bookshops. Booksellers, stallholders and street vendors worked together rather than operating in isolation, and the boundaries between these groups were blurred. Print production was centred on the parish of San Moisè, while Rialto and San Marco functioned as information centres, where print and performance were closely intertwined.
The print trade was a close-knit industry in which immigrants played a fundamental role. Using fascinating case studies, Chapter 3 reveals that the lives of many who produced and disseminated print were characterized by physical mobility, which was often intra-regional and temporary. Individuals and families engaged in a wide range of activity, encompassing print-selling, performance and other forms of commerce, and they thrived when they displayed adaptability and flexibility. Chapter 4 shifts the focus to cultural mobility, and examines common genres of cheap print, including books of battles, news-poems, scientific and medical texts, and devotional material. Salzberg identifies some interesting continuities in content and literary form between medieval performance and early modern print. There were also important changes. In the early sixteenth century, cheap religious print sometimes challenged the Church; later it promoted orthodoxy. Chapter 5 contextualizes this shift by providing an assessment of attempts – especially from the 1540s onwards – to monitor and control printed texts, the contexts in which they circulated, and the movement and behaviour of people associated with them. Numerous institutions were involved in regulation, including government magistracies, the Holy Office, and a newly-established guild of printers, booksellers and bookbinders. The guild sought to police participation in the trade, whereas the Esecutori contro la Bestemmia spearheaded the supervision of street sales. Salzberg paints a subtle picture of the limited impact of censorship on the circulation of cheap print, although she might have commented on whether attempts at regulation were a rhetorical strategy intended to have primarily symbolic resonances, and she could have reflected further on broader parallels with other Venetian guilds.
The book deserves to be widely read by scholars of early modern communication and urban culture. It is well written, highly readable and attentive to linguistic nuances; key Italian terms are retained and glossed in the text, longer quotations are deftly translated, and the original Italian is retained in the endnotes. Its most important contributions derive from the attention paid to the diverse range of people who were connected to the printing industry and who engaged with its activities, from buffoons and ambulant street sellers to humanists and noble office-holders. The print trade was socially diverse, encompassing figures on a spectrum from successful publishers who played an active role in the new guild to lowly pedlars on the margins of society. At the same time, the printing industry was strengthened by close social bonds, engendered by intermarriage, membership of lay confraternities, and acting as executors and pledges. The ubiquity of cheap print facilitated widespread participation in print culture, because people heard and saw print as well as purchasing and reading texts. Performance, mobility and the intermingling of genres stimulated interactions between courts, urban patriciates, middling sorts and the poor. These findings bring print to life and prompt further reflection on the impact of the movement of people within and beyond a city, and the implications of this mobility for identities and communities. An interesting tension emerges between the benefits of mobility which certain publishers, print-sellers and performers clearly recognized, and evidence of hostility towards the mobile and marginal, which became particularly acute in times of war, famine and disease. Overall, this study demonstrates persuasively that cheap print may have been ephemeral in its physical form, but it was not marginal in its significance.