Customizing Books Around Images in Early Modern Europe, 1400-1700


Art historians, codicologists, and historians of the book have increasingly come to recognize that printed books, like other categories of book, such as codices, were ‘permeable’ rather than ‘fixed’ objects. Just as manuscripts were mutable, their material form and constituent parts manipulable, so too, printed books could be adapted to need or use, their format altered to fit a wide spectrum of functions, in response to contingent circumstances of all kinds. Our session focuses on the ways in which pictorial images anchored processes of customization specific to the printed book. How did the presence of images condition alterations to the physical structure of the book—through insertion or interpolation, subtraction or deletion, adjustments in the ordering of folios or quires, amendments of image or text? Although our primary interest is in printed books and print series bound like books, we shall also consider how meaningful alterations made to incunabula and early printed books often followed (though also diverged from) the patterns such changes took in manuscript codices. In particular, we are interested in exploring the manner and meaning of autograph insertions—both written and drawn—into printed books, and conversely, of printed images embedded or interpolated into manuscripts. Throughout “Customizing Books Around Images,”the emphasis will fall on the hermeneutic functions of the modifications made by makers and users to the structure of their books.

Field of Study:






Chair:
Jennifer L Nelson,University of Wisconsin-Madison - jlnels@umich.edu
Discussant:
Bret L. Rothstein,Indiana University - brothste@indiana.edu

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