Fifteenth-Century Book Trade Project

A major new project in the History of the Book is announced: ‘The 15th-Century Book Trade: An Evidence-Based Assessment and Visualization of the Distribution, Sale, and Reception of Books in the Renaissance’. This five-year project, with the short-hand title of ‘15cBOOKTRADE’, is led by Dr Cristina Dondi and based in the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages of the University of Oxford; it is funded by a European Research Council Consolidator Grant.

The project’s aim is to use the material evidence from thousands of surviving books, as well as unique documentary evidence—the unpublished ledger of a Venetian bookseller from the 1480s—to address four fundamental objectives relating to the introduction of printing in the West that have so far eluded scholarship, partly because of lack of evidence and partly because of the lack of effective tools to deal with the existing evidence: the circulation of fifteenth-century printed books; their contemporary market-value; the identification of texts in the corpus of texts that were printed; and the circulation and reuse of illustrations in incunabular editions.

For the first of these objectives, the international database Material Evidence in Incunabula (MEI) (http://incunabula.cerl.org), conceived by Cristina Dondi and developed by Alex Jahnke of Data Conversion Group, hosted and maintained by the Consortium of European Research Libraries (CERL), gathers together evidence of the history of fifteenth-century printed books in the form of marks of ownership, prices, manuscript annotations, binding and decoration styles, to support advanced historical research on this material. For the first time, it has become possible to track the circulation of books, their trade routes, both national and international, their use and users, and the patterns of later collecting across Europe and the USA, and throughout the centuries. The new project will enable a significant expansion and enhancement of this database, by harvesting thousands of records presently scattered in the OPACs of hundreds of different libraries. The project will also experiment with the visualization of the circulation of books and of the texts they contain, throughout Europe and beyond.

On the market-value of printed books in early modern society, groundbreaking new evidence for understanding these economic and social dimensions is emerging from the in-depth study of the manuscript zornale, or day-book, of Francesco de Madiis. The ledger records the daily activity and sales of a Venetian bookshop from 1484 to 1488, as well as the inventory of the stock-in-trade for just over one year, to 1485. In this period 11,100 entries with their prices are registered, involving 6,950 sales, sometimes gifts or barters, and over 25,000 copies. Cristina Dondi and Neil Harris, Professor of Bibliography and Library Studies at the University of Udine, are working at a transcription of the original document with an accompanying critical apparatus.

To answer questions about the transmission and dissemination of incunabular texts, the project will enable the creation of a new database, TEXT-INC, for research in the corpus of all texts printed in the fifteenth century (that is, including multiple works, dedication letters, verses, etc.). The database will be modelled on the Bodleian’s Catalogue of Incunabula (Bod-inc). There will also be the opportunity for the enhancement of the British Library’s Incunabula Short Title Catalogue (ISTC) with the introduction of new research coordinates: lay/religious and subject categories applied to titles; time periods (classical, medieval, patristic, humanist, contemporary) applied to authors and anonymous works; a counter of copies.

On the circulation and reuse of illustrations in incunabular editions, the project will experiment with the application of image-matching software that has recently been devised by the Department of Engineering Science at Oxford to detect the reuse and copying of seventeenth-century English ballads held in the Bodleian Library, a pilot-project coordinated by Dr Alexandra Franklin and Dr Giles Bergel.

The MEI database as well as the forthcoming TEXT-INC database are collaborative enterprises coordinated by the 15cBOOKTRADE Project. The collaboration of scholars, librarians, and digital specialists—the strength of CERL—makes these exciting times for the study of early printed books. It is bringing to fruition...