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Montserrat Cachero and Natalia Maillard-Álvarez. eds. Book Markets in Mediterranean Europe and Latin America: Institutions and Strategies (15th-18th Centuries). New Directions in Book History. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. $119/$159.99. eBook/Hardcover. (ISBN: 978-3-031-13268-1/978-3-031-13267-4)

 This anthology consists of an introduction plus nine chapters in three sections: Privileged Markets; Economic Behaviour at the Market; and Institutions, Markets, and Incentives.^[1] Its category of book-historical study might be called “commonsensical British economic book history,” with a focus purely on the procedural and capitalist aspects of the production and distribution of books; indeed, few readers or even buyers appear (though the occasional government agent filches a book or two). Its power resides in bringing to English-speaking readers issues of early modern book production and book trade around the Mediterranean and the Atlantic produced by scholars primarily in those same areas, as well as in deploying and translating extensive archival documentation.

The editors provide an introduction, subtitled “The Circulation of Books During the Early Modern Period: Contexts and Perspectives” (Chap. 1, 1-18), in which they emphasize books as commodities, and lay out in two pages “the real nature of Early Modern trade” (1-2). The first section, “Privileged Markets” (Chaps. 2-4), attends to promotion and control of printing by privileges. The second section, “Economic Behaviour at the Market” (Chaps. 5-7), discusses the impact of politics and censorship on the book trade. Part III: “Institutions, Markets, and Incentives” (Chaps. 8-10) as “examines the ambivalent responsibility of authorities in different territories over the book market” (17), meaning ecclesiastical authorities.

Summarizing the arguments does not do justice to the richness of the documentary evidence, one of its most important contributions, but to give a sense of the diversity of the topics covered, I include a brief description of each chapter below. Angela Nuovo’s “Book Privileges in the Early Modern Age: From Trade Protection and Promotion to Content Regulation,” (Chap. 2, 21-34) traces the history of book privileges in Italy as they emerged first in Venice (1474), transferred from promotion of other industries, later spreading throughout Europe. The author compares Venice, where printing was approached as an industry, and Rome, which had no such well-developed book-production sector, and took books more as vehicles for potentially dangerous ideas. In her case study, Nuovo lays out a contrast between Rome with its papal court, ecclesiastical privilege, and authors asserting a kind of proto-intellectual-property rights, and Venice with its use of the privilege for commerce in encouraging and controlling the book industry.

Agnes Gehbald’s “A Pious Privilege: Printing for Hospitals and Orphanages Across the Spanish Empire” (Chap. 4, 35-63), looks at a series of privileges in a later stage (1598-1837), assigned by the monarchy to support institutions of social welfare through proceeds from “bestselling educational [texts]” that were always in demand, primers (cartillas), the corrected edition of Nebrija’s Latin grammar (Introductiones Latinae), and prayer books. She traces the history of each privilege until the early nineteenth century, the vicissitudes of the income they generated, management of the privilege including bidding out and complications, as well as the conflicts around monopolies; they were a valued source of steady income.

Natàlia Vilà-Urriza’s “Antonio Sanz and the Distribution of the Festivals and Vigils Calendar” (Ch. 4, 65-88) analyzes how a Madrid printer managed a privilege from 1734 to 1780. He didn’t produce all these in his own shop, but assigned production outside Madrid to regional printers by ceding the privilege, “linked since 1645 to the stand porters of the Council of Castile” in whose name Sanz produced the calendars, although he eventually held the privilege on his own (67-69). Vilà-Urriza undertakes a step-by-step analysis of Sanz’s business, ranging from composition and calculation of the lunations to his aggressive pursuit of exclusive production, perhaps through stereotyping.

Andrea Ottone’s “Serving the Church, Feeding the Academia: The Giunta and Their Market-Oriented Approach to European Institutions,” (Ch. 5, 91-118) traces the Giunta family’s entrepreneurial expansion, anchored in Catholic and academic centers of Reformation Europe, where they produced and to which they distributed liturgical, academic, and professional texts. According to Ottone, Lucantonio I, the founder, set as his business plan “to create his own loyal audience in a commercial space” built around classics and rhetoric (96), but “liturgical manuals still paid the bills” (108). As conflicts wore on, politics became harder to manage, and strict post-Tridentine control of liturgical works produced a conflict with the Papacy about Venetian production that proved costly to resolve and eventually Venice and the Giunta faded from dominance.

Natalia Maillard-Álvarez and Montserrat Cachero’s “Global Networks in the Atlantic Book Market (Booksellers and Inquisitors in the Spanish Empire)” (Chap. 6, 119-146) outlines the history of the book trade to New Spain and the mechanisms of Inquisitorial control. The particular sixteenth-century case analyzed here is from a detailed deposition. Further tracing the vicissitudes of a book-smuggling incident in widely-distributed archival records, they show that there was a global network of printers and book dealers in the book trade to the Americas, and that the participants leveraged their contacts to sometimes go beyond legal constraints. A computer visualization method, “Social Network Analysis,” is applied to reveal, first, the network outlined in the deposition filled in by testimony from other merchants, and then a much richer network sifted from a much wider array of data.

Airton Ribeiro da Silva Jr, in “A Pluricontinental Book Market: The Role of Booksellers in the Circulation of Knowledge Within the Portuguese Empire (c.1790-1820),” (Ch. 7, 147-169), focuses on the enlightened rule but anti-liberal politics of the Marquis of Pombal. Liberal and revolutionary notions threatened colonial powers, and the Pombaline administration established the secular Real Mesa Censória (1768) to control the circulation of books, the records of which are held in the Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo (Lisbon). From these, Silva examined all booksellers’ requests to ship books to Eastern colonies (Africa, India, and China) from 1796 to 1826. The titles of the article’s four main sections summarize his results: “A Pluricontinental Book Market Stocked by Lisbon”; “The Controlled Circulation of Books,” which lays out the mechanisms and procedures of control, shifted to the point of export; “Books and Book Merchants, The Agents of Circulation,” profiles the main booksellers, primarily French; and “Books to the Overseas” is a quantitative analysis by category of the books shipped.

Manuel José Pedraza-Gracia contributes “Publication and Distribution of the Pre-Tridentine Liturgical Book in Spain Through Notarial Documentation,” (Ch. 8, 173-209), a lengthy and detailed analysis of notarial documentation of contracts regarding production of religious books, with about half the early workshops stimulated by the Church. Pedraza-Gracia profiles his archival sources late in the essay: 66 contracts from 1483-1558 (numbers and dates vary from calculation to calculation), 48 with an ecclesiastical publisher, and 20 a lay publisher. These ground all his findings, although he also adduces early imprints without contractual documentation. Contracts show five thematic areas of publication: 1) edicts, rules, and procedures; 2) clerical formation; 3) liturgical works; only mentioned are: 4) “propagandistic” materials (“lists of indulgences or relics”); 5) utilitarian (indulgences) (177). Pedraza-Gracia analyzes legal, economic, and technical dimensions of publication as well as production by private publishers.

In “From Rome to Constantinople. The Greek Printers and the Struggles for Influence Between the Roman Catholic Church and the Ecumenical Patriarchate over the Christian Populations in the Eastern Mediterranean (Seventeenth Century),” (Ch. 9, 211-228), Alexandra Laliberté de Gagné outlines the role of printed books in Greek in the post-Tridentine competition for influence in Eastern Europe (primarily the Balkans) and the eastern Mediterranean among Roman Catholics, Greek Orthodox, and Protestant missionaries, providing an analysis of printed books as a propaganda tool, and the mechanisms of their circulation. Laliberté de Gagné discusses how Christian sects competed using the printing press in a kind of “book war,” with both production and suppression. In “Circulation,” Laliberté de Gagné details how the actors in this arena were clergymen and merchants, whether Greek or Latin; Franciscan and Jesuit missionaries also brought books, lists of which were preserved by the Sacra Congregatio. There were, then, two competing networks, with Orthodox influence more successful in the Greek and Albanian communities of Italy, and Roman Catholic works well-received in Greek-speaking territories.

Alberto José Campillo Pardo’s “The Territorial Component of Inquisitorial Book Control in the Eighteenth-Century Indias’ Trade to New Granada,” (Ch. 10, 229-249) traces the evolution of Inquisitorial control of the book in eighteenth-century trade to the Americas (Maillard-Álvarez and Cachero’s Chap. 6 treats an earlier phase), as bureaucratic control by the Real Hacienda increased. He examines ships’ registers for shipments to Cartagena de Indias in New Granada documenting procedures, which were more involved for books than for other cargo, requiring an additional memoria [list] of all books being shipped. Comparing practices at different ports,  Campillo Pardo asserts that not the procedure but the personnel made a difference in controlling books and ideas, which undermines any monolithic understanding of the Inquisition.

The deep archival work and analysis presented in the volume, while impressive, is severely compromised by the lack of adequate translation and copy-editing. Problems of clarity, style, and lexicon have not been addressed in the final editing. For example, the statement on 126 that “the objective of the court was to ensure that the filigrees behaved according to the norms dictated by the Catholic Church” would be unintelligible to most readers—“filigrés” or “filigreses” may look like the English word “filigrees,” but it means “parishioner.” It is possible that this is a set of self-translated essays rather than professionally translated. These linguistic issues can make the book hard to parse, and some of the chapters would have benefited from developmental editing to build stronger arguments on the archival research. Palgrave Macmillan is profoundly remiss in not having made sure that translation was adequate and the manuscript was copy-edited. Since this is a scholarly publication, one wonders about the process of peer review, which also seems to have either failed or have been ignored.

— Linde M. Brocato, University of Miami (Coral Gables, Florida)