“In the most illustrious of all cities, so miserable a press”: antiquarianism, printing and epigraphy in André de Resende (c. 1500-1573)

Abstract

This article seeks to understand the relationship between antiquarian practice in Early Modern Europe and the introduction of printing technologies based on the work of the Portuguese humanist André de Resende. Drawing upon both the history of the book and the history of historiography, the article discusses how the permanence of handwritten texts, the technical difficulties related to the printing process and the limitations of the antiquarians themselves turned a set of technical circumstances into theoretical problems. Therefore, the distinction between “literary” and “non-literary” historical sources proposed by the Italian historian Arnaldo Momigliano is questioned through a detailed observation of the study and communicational procedures devised by modern antiquarians.