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News from Negroponte: Politics, Popular Opinion, and Information Exchange in the First Decade of the Italian Press?*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Margaret Meserve
Margaret Meserve*
Affiliation:
University of Notre Dame
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Abstract

The fall of Negroponte to the Turks in 1470 was one of the first events in European history to be recorded in print. This article examines a little-known cluster of more than a dozen texts published in the months after the colony’s fall by some of the earliest printers to work in Italy. These editions did not “break” the news to the Italian public but rather offered analysis and commentary to an already well-informed readership. Some catered to contemporary demands for vernacular political poetry, while others now reveal the extent to which Italian humanists attached themselves to the printing industry in its earliest years, often with ambiguous results”

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 59 , Issue 2 , Summer 2006 , pp. 440 - 480
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 2006

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Footnotes

*

For helpful comments, criticisms, and suggestions I thank Jill Kraye, Martin Davies, Anthony Grafton, James Hankins, Mordechai Feingold, John Van Engen, Eileen Reeves, and Robert Goulding. John Goldfinch, Filippo de Vivo, Mary Laven, and Paul Cobb solved tricky questions. I am especially grateful to Peter Stallybrass, who persuaded me to pursue this project at a critical juncture. All translations are my own.

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