Cristina Dondi

I work on the European printing revolution (1450-1500), using the half a million of books which still survive today as historical sources, to understand who used them, and how. This bottom up approach is finally disclosing how European society, transitioning from a medieval to an early modern period, reacted to the technological innovation wrought about by the invention of printing with movable type: issues of trade, the cost of books in comparison with the cost of living, literacy, the transmission of texts in print, the circulation of ideas. The international database Material Evidence in Incunabula, which I developed in 2009, contains data from 50,000 books, that is 10% of the total, contributed by a network of over 400 European and American libraries and over 200 editors. In the database, and in a visualisation suite, we track the movement of each book over time and space, as well as the formation and dispersal of collections. We are also investigating the reasons, political, economical, or religious, behind the migration of cultural heritage. The project started in 2009 with a British Academy grant and significantly progressed with a ERC Consolidator grant during the period 2014-19. To celebrate the end of the ERC project and share its surprising results with the general public I organised a large exhibition in Venice, Museo Correr and Marciana National Library (1 September 2018–30 April 2019): Printing Revolution 1450-1500. Fifty Years that Changed Europe. It received 200,000 visitors from all over the world and thousands of enthusiastic messages. The digital content of the exhibition (15 videos, interactive maps, graphs, etc) is now a website, Printing Revolution, which is hosting new outreach material based on the latest research as it becomes available.