This slim volume explores the complex networks of financial, business, and humanist relationships in late fifteenth-century Florence that intersected with the career of a printer, Niccolò di Lorenzo della Magna. Lorenzo was connected to another network—German bureaucrats—due to his origins in Breslau. Around 1480, he had four presses operating simultaneously and about ten craftsmen in his shop, of whom nothing is known. As with the development of printing in other areas of Europe, many early Florentine printers were gold or metal smiths, a number of them having been employed in the Florence mint. Entire families were involved in all stages of the early printing process as authors, editors, translators, punch cutters, printers, and stationers. One member of the Cennini family worked in the mint and assisted Ghiberti in crafting the bronze doors of the Baptistery before becoming a punch cutter in the family's printing business. The author also traces several fonts of type belonging to Lorenzo through various editions and print shops.
This study demonstrates well the challenges involved in printing and selling incunables in the Tuscan city-state and to a certain extent the Italian Peninsula. A notable aspect of Lorenzo's career is the number of different partnerships he entered into to bankroll his business and how frequently they dissolved. Financing to acquire paper, type, and premises was often difficult to obtain and was in any case very fluid. The author frequently notes the difficulty of tracing early members of the book trade and that most information about many of them comes from court cases and legal prosecutions for debt. Increasing numbers of churchmen and priests were involved in Florentine printing because clergy were exempt from prosecution for debt by the commune. Still, the author shows in some detail that the social world of the Florentine printer was dynamic as well as diverse.
The uniquely Florentine aspect of early printing found here is the array of various business alliances that underpinned the endeavor. The first printing in the city, for example, was done by a company including a stationer, a silk merchant, a banker, and a painter with Medici connections. Wool merchants were very involved in early Florentine printing, often as financiers of printers, printing companies, and particular editions. This book brings to the fore a lesser-known aspect of wool economy: woolen cloth was often collateral for loans to printers as well as currency for payment of printers’ debts. Printers also paid workers in their print shops in woolen cloth. Printers and stationers in Florence were members of the apothecaries’ guild, which controlled the sale of paper. (Parchment was controlled by the leatherworkers’ guild.) No one trade in Florence had control over printing, however, and the number of different professions found among Lorenzo's partners is quite diverse. The Roman Catholic Church, intricately bound up with Florentine finance, was vital to the printing business in several ways, including monasteries that made paper, likely housed print shops, and commissioned books.
Lorenzo printed religious works including papal indulgences and Sixtus IV's call to crusade against the Turks. His presses also printed multiple editions of Cherubino da Spoleto's Regola della vita spirituale and Regola della vita matrimoniale. He did a fair share of printing humanist texts both in the vernacular and in Latin. Lorenzo's first known imprint is Ficino's De Christiana religione (1476) in Latin. In 1481, Lorenzo printed an edition of Dante's Divina Commedia. He also produced printed texts by Alberti, Petrarch, Poliziano, and a number of religious and humanists with Medici connections. The author has solid arguments for identifying Lorenzo as the anonymous Printer of Terentius, Pr. 6748.
This book includes 110 pages of text, supplemented by two appendixes, an extensive bibliography, and an index. One appendix is a list of Lorenzo's known imprints, an impressive forty-three titles. The other appendix provides the text of relevant documentary sources in Italian. The book uses endnotes rather than footnotes and all the endnotes are placed together at the end of the text following the appendixes, an unfortunate arrangement. Still, this book is a very persuasive study packed full of relevant information about early Florentine printers and printing.
