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8 Not Wanderers but Faithful Companions

A Brief Overview on the Hebrew Incunabula Held in Italian Libraries

Marco Bertagna    15cHEBRAICA, University of Oxford, UK    

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abstract

The late 15th century became a time of dramatic changes in the Hebrew book-making as well. The Hebraica team of the 15cBOOKTRADE project prepared a thorough description of the extant copies of the Hebrew incunabula kept in the libraries of Europe and Israel. Notes of ownership, deeds of sale, personal remarks, institutional stamps, signatures of censors – all of them provide a rich picture of the distribution and use of Hebrew printed books throughout Europe (and also their ways from Europe to North Africa and the Middle East). Among a few hundreds of the checked volumes some were printed in Italy and remained there all the centuries since then, others were printed in Portugal and soon made their way to the Ottoman lands and from there to Yemen or Persia. Although the survey is not complete yet, since some important collections such as Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana still need to be included in the MEI database, the main results can enrich our knowledge on certain rabbis and scholars or provide interesting evidence of communal life, literacy, trade, the role of women and of the books in private possession.

Published
Feb. 24, 2020
Accepted
Nov. 5, 2019
Submitted
May 6, 2019
Language
IT
ISBN (PRINT)
978-88-6969-333-5
ISBN (EBOOK)
978-88-6969-332-8

Keywords: Hebrew incunabulaProvenance researchBook-makingLibrariesBook trade

Copyright: © 2020 Marco Bertagna. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.