Скачать или смотреть Research Lecture | Early Books' Migration: European Upheaval and American Collections

This lecture presents the ongoing investigation of the consequences—intended and unintended, direct and indirect—of historical policies and political events on the European book heritage that migrated to the United States, with a specific focus on 15th-century printed books, the so-called incunabula.

The title of this lecture is also the title of a four-year project that Professor Cristina Dondi is leading at the University of Rome to investigate the consequences—intended and unintended, direct and indirect—of historical policies and political events on the European book heritage that migrated to the United States.

Between the 18th and 20th centuries, major political changes in Europe mobilized vast quantities of early European printed heritage that ultimately formed the core of American public collections. Policies such as the secularization of religious houses implemented under Joseph II, Napoleon, the formation of the Italian, Spanish, and Greek State, and events such as the October Revolution and the two World Wars caused the sequestration, disposal, dispersal, transfer, and sale of thousands of books printed in Europe in the 15th-century, the so-called incunabula, around 50,000 of which are today preserved in hundreds of libraries in the United States.

For the past fifteen years, Professor Dondi has been coordinating a large cohort of scholars and librarians who have been tracking the very mobile history of tens of thousands of incunabula today in hundreds of European and American libraries. Details of decoration, manuscript annotations, bindings, and ownership inscriptions are being fed into a powerful database that returns two valuable results: tracking the movement of each book over time and space and reconstructing dispersed collections. The lecture will discuss why this research matters and what we do with it.

This is the Zeidberg Lecture in the History of the Book.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Cristina Dondi is a Professor of Modern History at Sapienza University of Rome and has been the Secretary of the Consortium of European Research Libraries (CERL) since 2009. From 1994 to 2023 she was at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Lincoln College. During the period 2014–2019, she was the Principal Investigator of the European Research Council-funded 15cBOOKTRADE Project, which focused on the economic and social impact of the printing revolution on European society. The results were published in 2020 in the volume Printing Revolution and Society, 1450-1500. Fifty Years that Changed Europe (open access) and was shared with the general public in an exhibition in Venice, Correr Museum (2018/19), and in Buenos Aires (2022/23); its digital outputs are available on the website https://www.printingrevolution.eu/.