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SARA BARKER (Re)printing the French Wars of Religion: producing pamphlets in a time of civil conflict 

The French Wars of Religion tore France apart for four decades at the end of the sixteenth century. As they did so, each stage of the conflict was tracked and reported by publications produced both in the major printing centres of Paris and Lyon, from smaller presses across the country and from anonymous presses whose details often still elude us. In this paper, I will briefly consider the role that printing played in the unfolding of the wars of religion before looking at how and when works were reprinted across the country, and what the stylistic presentation of these works suggests about the development of the pamphlet in France, and how such items were understood by their producers.  

SARA is Associate Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Leeds, where she is also the Deputy Director of the Centre for the Comparative History of Print [CHoP], an interdisciplinary centre for all things print-related and proud custodians of a working print room. She is interested in the print culture of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, with recent publications in Renaissance and Reformation on translations of news accounts about natural disasters in Early Modern England and France, and on French as an intermediary language for news translation between Italy and Britain in Rivista di Letteratura Storiografica Italiana. She is completing a monograph on news, pamphlets and translation in early modern England and France, and her current interests focus on the design and materiality of early modern printed works.

BENITO RIAL COSTAS Printing Accents by Plantin, or a Case Study of a Spanish Graphic Feature

This talk will analyse some of the typographic instructions sent from Madrid between 1571 and 1576 to Christophe Plantin in order to print Tridentine liturgical books for Spain. It will also show how the missals and breviaries sent by Plantin to Spain during those years were the result of a friction between what Spain was asking for and what Plantin was willing, or able, to print. Such analysis and study will shed light on the differences between Spanish printing features and Plantin’s practices and alleged limitations, and will raise new questions regarding the sixteenth-century clash between local and international typographic peculiarities.

Benito Rial Costas (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)