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S F I V E commerce with books: reading practices and book diffusion at the habsburg court in florence (1765–1790) Renato Pasta Robert Darnton’s pathbreaking work on the social history of ideas has made scholars aware of the key role that eighteenth-century booksellers had in spreading the ideologies of the Enlightenment. Although he has never provided a theoretical definition of what the Enlightenment was, his refreshingly oldfashioned approach to scholarship concentrates on the relationship between books and the Revolution, and it hinges on archival research in contrast with the fashionable abstractions of postmodernist methodological discourse.1 The pattern that emerges appears to be more checkered than what book historians and specialists on the eighteenth century used to believe before the 1980s. We are now aware both of the wide diffusion of Enlightenment language before 1789 and of the social and institutional constraints that limited its potential for change after 1770.This essay aims at exploring some aspects of book diffusion and the practice of reading in a specific context: the Habsburg-Lorraine court in Florence during the second half of the eighteenth century. There, French books and Enlightenment ideologies circulated freely, but court life also hosted other, less radical influences, such as natural law, jurisdictionalism, Jansenism, and the language of gradual progress and brotherhood fostered by the international networks of Freemasonry.The essay aims to offer a nuanced view of high culture in one of the centers of intellectual and political life during the age of reform in Italy. In 1771, Peter Leopold, Habsburg Grand Duke of Tuscany, ordered that the twenty-thousand-volume library of the Medicis be transferred from the royal residence in Pitti Palace to the public library in Florence, the Magliabechiana ,an institution donated by Antonio Magliabechi to the city and opened for public use in 1747.2 The decision to move the Medici collections out of Pitti reflected the wish to increase the stock of printed matter available in the Magliabechiana, thereby promoting the “pursuit of happiness” in town and the moral betterment of the reading public. Practical motivations also lay behind Peter Leopold’s move. As his family rapidly expanded, they started to need the rooms used to house the Medici library. The first child of the grand ducal couple, Francis, was born to Maria Louise of Bourbon-Parma and Peter Leopold in 1768. He was to succeed his father as emperor in 1792. The second male child, Ferdinand, born in 1769, became Grand Duke of Tuscany in 1791, following Leopold’s accession to the imperial throne in Vienna in 1790. Between their marriage in 1765 and the death of Leopold II, the grand ducal couple bore fifteen children, many of them surviving the death of their parents . Thus, freeing up living space at Pitti became urgent, and the relocation of the Medici library seemed an appropriate solution.3 Most of the Medicis’ book collections are now preserved in the holdings of the Biblioteca Nazionale, Florence.They provide scholars with several heterodox and libertine works that Magliabechi, himself working at the core of a network of erudite and princely correspondents, had eagerly bought around the turn of the eighteenth century. Some volumes belonging to the Medici collection were dispersed among the Florentine and Tuscan libraries in 1771/72 and double exemplars were auctioned off. Some texts reached the new library of the Imperial Cabinet of Physics and Natural History, which had been established in 1766 and opened to the public in 1775.4 Other volumes were donated to the library of the University of Pisa. At an intellectual and organizational level, therefore, Peter Leopold’s choice represented a rational distribution of the existing collections for the benefit of the grand duchy’s learned institutions. It reflected the Habsburgs ’ cultural politics in Italy and compares, albeit on a minor scale, with the reorganization of research institutions in Lombardy that Maria Theresa carried out in the early 1770s, especially after the suppression of the Jesuits in 1773. The evidence for this essay rests primarily, but not exclusively, on the printed catalog of the private grand ducal library that was assembled in 1771 in order to compensate for the loss of the older Medici volumes.The Catalogue des livres du Cabinet particulier des LL. AA. RR.5 presents a remarkable set of manuscript comments written either at the bequest of the sovereign or directly by the grand duke himself. In this catalog, the ruler cast...

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