Talk at #UCDavis 12/11 by Evelyn Lincoln “Publication Anxiety in Early Modern Italy”

Please join Innovating Communication and Scholarship (ICIS), the Center for Science and Innovation Studies (CSIS), and Science and Technology Studies for a lunchtime event with Evelyn Lincoln on:

Publication Anxiety in Early Modern Italy

When: Thursday December 11th from 12:10 – 1:30 PM

Where: Room SS&H 1246 (STS /CSIS Room)

Discussant: Alessandro Delfanti

Lunch provided. Please RSVP if you plan to attend.

Abstract: Publishing a book in

early modern Rome meant braving the Inquisition and the difficulties of

Renaissance business relationships to enter a conversation taking place

in print that was often less than civil.

Authors worried about being accused of claiming to be more

knowledgeable than they really were. On the other hand, they also

actually may have been presenting themselves as something they were not,

and worried about being found out. Some authors found themselves

with time on their hands as their books languished in the presses,

encouraging them to pen long blaming screeds against the publishers who

were forced to include them in the finished book. Strategies for

managing publication anxiety on the part of both publishers

and authors were inventive, original, and different in every book, and

they came to shape the combative and dialogical character of late

sixteenth-century Roman book printing.

Evelyn Lincoln is Professor of the History of Art & Architecture and Italian Studies at Brown University. Her first book,

the Invention of the Italian Renaissance Printmaker (Yale, 2000) traced the careers of pictorial printmakers in Italy in the first century of its development. Brilliant Discourse. Pictures and Readers in Early Modern Rome (Yale, 2014) looks at the role played by the publication of

illustrated technical manuals in forming networks of printers,

publishers, artists and patrons, all of whom were also readers. Her

research investigates knowledge networks formed through making

and using pictures in the early modern world.

After you RSVP, you will be emailed with the paper to be discussed.