Date/Time
Date(s) - 9 Sep 2013
5:15 PM - 6:30 PM
Location
Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center
Category(ies) No Categories
Peter Stallybrass, on “Resisting Censorship: Petrarch and the Venetian Book Trade, 1549-1627.”
**New Location** on the renovated sixth floor of Van Pelt-Dietrich Library.
Class of ’78 Pavilion, in the Special Collections Center on the 6th floor of Van Pelt-Dietrich Library, University of Pennsylvania
From Peter Stallybrass:
“Lists of heretical books were drawn up in Venice between 1549 and 1554 but they seem to have had little or no impact upon Venetian printers and booksellers. But in 1559, Rome published an index of prohibited books, which demanded the expurgation of three of Petrarch’s sonnets that attacked the papacy. Venetian publishers were put under increasing pressure to conform during the 1560s and 70s, including the threat to prohibit the sale of Venetian books throughout Italy.
The censorship of the three Petrarch poems provides a fascinating case study – one that Dan Traister first drew to my attention in an exhibition on censorship and that was further illuminated by Stephen Krewson in his undergraduate thesis on “Physical Techniques of Expurgation.” Over the last few years, I’ve examined more than a hundred censored copies of Petrarch’s *Rime*– and what has struck me most is the sheer variety of the material forms of expurgation and the fact that the expurgated copies had to be returned to their owners afterwards. At the same time, the Venetian printers and booksellers found remarkable ways both to visualize the work of the expurgators and to undo it.
Finally, I want to explore the role that the Catholic Index played in constituting an English literary canon that gave a privileged role to continental writers (including Petrarch) whose work had been expurgated or prohibited.
Peter Stallybrass is Annenberg Professor in the Humanities and Director of the History of Material Texts at the University of Pennsylvania. He has curated exhibitions with Jim Green at the Library Company on “Material Texts” and on “Benjamin Franklin, Writer and Printer” and with Heather Wolfe at the Folger Shakespeare Library on “Technologies of Writing in the Renaissance.” His A. S. W. Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography on “Printing for Manuscript” will be published next year by the University of Pennsylvania Press and he is at present working with Roger Chartier on a history of the book from wax tablets to e-books.”