University of Galway History Research Seminar: Documenting the History of Popular Religious Print in Early Modern Italy: Printed prayers, c.1460-1660

University of Galway History Research Seminar

Documenting the History of Popular Religious Print in Early Modern Italy: 
Printed Prayers, c.1460-1660
Dr Katherine Tycz
University of Galway

Abstract

In this paper, I will discuss the preliminary outcomes of my Printed Prayers in Italy, c. 1460–1660 research project, which has been undertaken during an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Galway (2021–2023). This presentation will explore how this project’s goal of aggregating cheap devotional pamphlets, broadsheets, and popular prints from early modern Italy and analysing them as a corpus reveals information about the production, distribution, and consumption of cheap religious print in early modern Italy. 

Popular pious print has thus far received less scholarly attention than elite devotional books and theological treatises from Italy in this period. However, scholarship of Italian book history has recently revived interest in exploring the ephemeral print production of the early modern print world. My research focuses on those that were devotional in nature, a subset that has still received less comprehensive attention. To-date, I have catalogued more than 350 examples of printed prayers and have performed a close analysis of about half of these examples. Many of the examples catalogued do not include full bibliographic information regarding printers, publication places, or dates. This presentation will highlight how my Printed Prayers project’s approach of comprehensively documenting these printed prayers in a database coupled with close material, visual, and textual analysis of textual contents, typefaces, page design, and images allows us to better understand their place in book history and early modern culture. 

Speaker Biography
Katherine Tycz is an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow in the Discipline of Italian at the University of Galway, where she is based in the Moore Institute. Katherine’s interdisciplinary research engages with early modern Italian devotional practices and material culture, focusing on the material text. From 2018-2019, Katherine was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Wolf Humanities Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Katherine earned her PhD in Italian from the University of Cambridge in 2018.She has taught Italian literature, the history of medieval and Renaissance religion, and the history of material culture and decorative arts. Katherine has also worked on curatorial and collections research projects for permanent collections and for exhibitions in museums in the US and UK. She has published on Italian decorative arts and material culture, women in early modern Italy, early modern devotional objects and practices, print culture, and daily life in Renaissance Europe.  

Registration

This is an in-person event, in Room G010, Hardiman Research Building, University of Galway (ground floor). For those of you not able to attend in person, the talk will also be streamed on Zoom: https://universityofgalway-ie.zoom.us/j/98858688716. To attend via Zoom, please register at: https://forms.office.com/e/2vsTD6QxRE.

This seminar is organised jointly with the Centre for the Study of Religion at the Moore Institute, University of Galway.

The talk will be preceded at 3.30pm by a reception to mark the beginning of the new academic year. All are welcome!

A copy of the full seminar programme for Semester 1, 2023-24, is available here: University_Of_Galway_History_Seminar_2023-24_Semester_01.

Image: Detail from Boekverkoper, Simon Guillain (II), after Annibale Carracci (etching, 1646), Rijksmuseum: https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/collection/RP-P-2015-26-926.