Kick-off Meeting of the Max Planck Partner Group “The Production of Knowledge of Normativity and the Early Modern Book Trade”, University of Trento (School of International Studies), 28.-29.11.2023

Trent, November 28, 2023: early morning, the air is cold, the sky is blue and clear, the snow-capped mountains form a brilliant panorama. In the seminar room: home-made chocolate cookies on the table, laptops open and connected, the University of Trento is ready. The Kick-off meeting of the Max Plank Partner Group “The Production of Knowledge of Normativity and the Early Modern Book Trade” begins!

Twelve scholars from all over Europe and the Americas, belonging to different scholarly disciplines (legal history, book history, early modern history) come together in the city of the Council for two days, to set the stage and define the coordinates of their shared scholarly adventure for the next 4 years. The meeting’s aim: identify lines of common research on the production of knowledge of normativity and its connection with the world of the printing press in the early modern period. Manuela Bragagnolo put some basic elements on the table (alongside the cookies) to be analysed together: the relationship between normative knowledge and knowledge per se, practices connected with the production of this particular branch of knowledge, and books as material objects in Robert Darnton’s communication circuit (production, circulation and reception). This aspect is crucial for understanding how normative knowledge was produced.

After this introductory reflection, the actual collective work starts: members of the group present their lines of research, focussing on the relationship between the logic of the printing press and the production of normative knowledge. A field everyone approaches with their own expertise which they share in the discussions. The goal: to create shared categories and a common framework for further studies. In presentations and discussions, different actors, technological and economic factors, as well as the materiality of the book are observed in action in the production of normative knowledge.

Factors, actors and materiality

Factors

Economic interests, commercial logistics, different markets, legislation and the peculiarities of the various contexts of book production, circulation and consumption are some of the key factors: analysing them will allow us to know more about how normative knowledge was produced. Consequently, printers, booksellers, authors, and legislators belong to the main actors to be followed.

The legislation on book production, circulation and use was one of the most pervasive factors in shaping how books were produced and sold. Printing privileges, in particular, shaped the book production. Marius Buning and Andrea Ottone showed that the powerful papal privileges were universal, as they applied to the whole catholic world. They were not conceded lightly and served also as an instrument of control: the authorities granting the privilege could intervene in the contents of the book, a power that is especially evident for liturgy books and other religious works.

Legal books can be regarded as a sub-category of normative books in a broader sense. Producing and selling erudite corpora of learned law required complex and very expensive editorial enterprises which were very different from the fast production of legislative texts, often ephemeral and cheaply produced mass-editions of royal acts. Both sorts of publications were made for very different international and local markets, with wide variations in materiality and dissemination.

Thinking about normative knowledge in the early modern period, however, is not limited to legal books in a strict sense: several branches of knowledge can be regarded as normative. Religious normativity and moral theology played a crucial role. Warfare also produced an important type of normative knowledge. Luca Giangolini discussed how military and political contexts of production influenced military normative knowledge on discipline, showing the impact of their dynamics in Flanders (16^th/17^th centuries) on the production of military literature on discipline and its subsequent commercial logics.

Actors

Of course, printers are especially interesting actors in the production of knowledge. The Portonariis family, studied by Natalia M. Álvarez, belonged to the most active printers engaged in publishing legal and normative books. They were international players, setting up a powerful family network that connected Lyon to Venice to Madrid to Seville and selling their books all over Europe and in the Americas. Thus, the dynamics in family and network were an integral factor in the production of books.

Printers often were far from being simple artisans, only concerned with the printing process itself. They were also publishers and businessmen, some of them being mainly active in financing, distributing and selling. Renaud Milazzo showed how book prices were one of the key factors in shaping book production and distribution. Thus, printers, booksellers, financiers, and publishers all became relevant actors in the production of knowledge by their financial interests in the book trade.

The printing of the first royal acts in France serves as an example: this happened as a private initiative of printers and publishers and, as Xavier Prévost pointed out, the interaction between private printers and political authorities transformed legislative practices. Again, printing privileges played a crucial role. The French Crown granted some printers the privilege to print royal acts and ordinances, as well as to organise them into collections as a way to assure and control the circulation of the law. This was not an exclusively European phenomenon: Ting Zhang showed that the dissemination of cheap commercial legal editions during the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) resulted from printers’ private initiatives. The massive circulation of the commercial editions had a profound impact on the production and the spread of normative knowledge in Qing China. 

Authors did not only write the text but also performed different roles in the process of knowledge production. Not only did they have a clear perception of the mechanisms of the printing privileges, but they also used different editions and translations to modify and update their text: a practice that was not limited to legal and moral theological texts such as Martín de Azpilcueta’s “Manual de Confessores” but was widespread, as Michaela Valente and Gastón García demonstrated on the examples of Jean Bodin’s “Démonomanie de sorciers” and Johann Weir’s “De praestigiis daemonum”.

Materiality

Polina Solonets and Christiane Birr approached Luis de Molina’s “De Iustitia et Iure” from the perspectives of two different disciplines, digital humanities and legal history, both focussing on the material aspects of a complex publication history. Molina’s work consists of six tomes, printed in seven volumes by four different publishers in two cities, over the course of sixteen years (1593-1609). The layout of the first two volumes was influenced by the technical capabilities of the printing presses in the provincial town of Cuenca where Molina had retired to avoid scrutiny from the inquisition. These two volumes, for example, do not contain any summaries, perhaps because Molina worked alone to prepare the manuscript for print, given the lack of expertise and resources of the local printers: an example of the material challenges that printing presses posed to authors and printers alike. Not only does the materiality of book have to be taken into account when analysing the production of knowledge, but Molina’s case also highlights the need to examine the relationship between authors and printers. 

Next steps

As in any good discussion, new questions (alongside the now empty plate of cookies) are on the table: what kind of normative knowledge was stored and mobilized in printed books? Did the emergence of print and the development of the early modern book trade change or contribute to shaping ideas and practices related to normative knowledge? Which categories did the main actors of the book trade use to classify normative books and normative knowledge? How did print shops work as lieux de savoir? Who gathered there? In short: what kind of sources can help to understand how the production of normative knowledge occured?

These are some examples of the questions which will be tackled at the partner group’s next meeting, all so as to bring new light to the way in which the production, circulation and consumption of legal books contributed to the production of knowledge of normativity.