The social life of texts in Renaissance Italy

Abigail Brundin (BSR)

Director's one-year anniversary lecture

This event will be in English.

During twenty years of reading and researching Renaissance texts, I have become fascinated by questions of reception and readership. This lecture traces the journey on which my research has taken me in that period, from writers to readers and from the very highest courtly poetry to the scraps of text worn on the bodies of illiterate workmen. I will aim to assess some of the wide variety of ways in which texts were used and consumed in the first decades of the age of print.