2 - Shaping Cultural Capital Away from Home: Literature and Canon Formation from Ariosto to Cervantes

Summary

The early sixteenth-century Italian appropriation of Spanish sentimental fiction developed through channels that followed the limited horizons of a new enterprise, the printing press. Though still in its infancy, at that moment its apparatus was extending its reach in symbiosis with the changing tastes and leisure patterns of an expanding social class. But by mid century, the printing press had blossomed into much more than a full-fledged industry, and that partnership with the expanding reading public had morphed into the immense power to influence and define the ideology of an entire era. The political and cultural programs that the incipient nation-states embarked upon in the process to define their place in the unstable equilibrium of counter-reformist Europe rested much of their agency and success upon the authority and prestige that the printed text ensured. The Renaissance book is at the center of development of the ideas and values that still define what constitutes culture (Quondam, “Mercanzia d'onore”). The Spanish literature diffusion program that the Venetian printer Gabriel Giolito launched is a telling example of the important part that the book played in defining the notion of empire. This chapter discusses the effects that choices and practices employed by the Italian editors to define the boundaries of an Italian literary language had on the definition of the literary canon that was to splendidly represent the age of Charles V.

Alfonso de Ulloa's Editorial Project

The Spaniard Alfonso de Ulloa, who lived in Venice from his early youth onwards, earned a living for over twenty years by editing and translating Spanish works into Italian and vice versa.