KNIR Colloquium: Material Memory: Sammelbände and the Preservation of Popular Print in and from Italian Contexts (c. 1470-1650)

This KNIR Colloquium is organised by Rozanne Versendaal (Utrecht University) and is financially supported by the Koninklijk Nederlands Instituut in Rome (KNIR). It is made possible thanks to the assistance of the staff of the KNIR, the British School at Rome, the Vatican Library, and the international Sammelband 15-16 project. It also marks the fourteenth event bringing together members of the Sammelband 15-16 research group to study Sammelbände.

This KNIR Colloquium focuses on the role of Sammelbände as sources for understanding the production, circulation and reception of early modern popular print, especially in and from Italian contexts. Bringing together international scholars and librarians working on early modern material bibliography, popular print culture, and book history, the meeting will examine Sammelbände not merely as accidental archives, but as purposeful constructions that shaped the transmission of popular texts. While individual ephemera can be extremely hard to trace, their presence in Sammelbände reveals clues about patterns of dissemination, reuse, and the perceived value of certain texts over time. That is, Sammelbände also challenge our conventional assumptions about popular print as mainly ephemeral and transient. This conference on early modern popular print in Italy during the fi rst two centuries of print will pay particular attention to Italian religious, festive, theatrical, and literary texts. These types of texts often resonate with performative activities held in and around Italian cities and could be sold and distributed by ambulant sellers right after a performance. Papers will also look at diff erent types of ephemeral print in Italian contexts, such as news pamphlets, and will explore the lives and afterlives of these imprints in collected volumes. The colloquium brings together members of the existing Sammelband 15-16 research network and new researchers working on popular print, fostering a dialogue across diff erent specialisms. Although the geographical emphasis of the colloquium will be on northern and central Italy, comparative cases of Sammelbände from other European regions will be discussed, particularly where they shed light on the collecting practices of small print, or on religious, festive and performance-related book culture. Interesting points of reference are popular print in the Low Countries, France and Germany, as popular print was probably produced, disseminated and consumed in similar ways as in Italy in the early modern period.

Programme

to be published