Fat Book Lecture Series: Slim Volumes Become Wide

Schedule information
Event	Fat Book Lecture Series: Slim Volumes Become Wide
When	Friday, November 30, 2012 from 12:00pm to 1:00pm
Where	Edward B. Bunn, S.J. Intercultural Center 462
Event details
Details	Slim Volumes Become Wide; Or, How A Little Spanish Romance Became a Massive French Work (and then A Little English Book, and then A Tiny Flemish Textbook); Or, By The Size of Their Books You Shall Know Them with Emily Francomano Associate Professor Department of Spanish and Portuguese Circa 1489, Diego de San Pedro subjected his literary works to moral inquisition, painting his most successful romance, Cárcel de amor [The Prison of Love], as a “sinner’s sauce” that “could not be read with composure” and a “mortal enemy of the soul.” San Pedro might have worried about the book’s ill effects, but its many translators, printers, and publishers did not, and they adapted the romance for audiences at multiple social levels and with varied goals for reading. By the first decades of the sixteenth century just about everyone who was anyone was reading or otherwise enjoying The Prison of Love. It traversed the linguistic, diplomatic, and intellectual circles revolving around the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, Henry VIII of England, Francis I of France, Emperor Charles V, and multiple Italian princely courts. By the middle of the sixteenth century, anyone with the means could buy an edition of the romance as well. The Prison of Love was read in large elegant print editions dedicated to noble personages, in bilingual editions advertised as language primers, and in small, cheap formats, devoid of decoration, dedicated to no one in particular. In all, it appeared in over seventy printed editions in Spanish and in translation to Italian, French, and English before 1600. In addition to this impressive presence in sixteenth-century print culture, richly illuminated manuscripts and three sumptuous tapestry chambers produced in the 1520s attest to the remarkable cultural and material penetrance of The Prison of Love. My presentation for “Fat Books” is part of a larger project in progress that studies, on the one hand, the networks of patronage and printing through which The Prison of Love moved in the sixteenth century and, on the other, the material forms that shaped its cosmopolitan transmission and reception. That there existed a tight hold of one hand upon the other, of material form upon network and vice versa, is one of my book’s central arguments. On November 30th, I will focus on the how the sizes of printed books, manuscripts and tapestries of The Prison of Love offer insights into the history of reading, translation, and the social functions of books as material objects in early modern European culture.
Access	» This event is limited to Georgetown University students, faculty and staff.
Contact	Conor T. Sinclair 202.687.6051
Sponsors	Faculty of Languages and Linguistics (FLL)
Web site	For more information, see https://gushare.georgetown.edu/GermanLanguage/Public/fatbookslectureseries.docx
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