Androniki Dialeti (University of Thessaly, Greece)
Aldus Manutius, a prominent figure in the publishing industry of Renaissance Venice, has long attracted scholarly attention, which has enhanced our understanding of his editions, innovative techniques and methods, collaborators, patrons and sponsors, as well as the financial aspects of his enterprise. This paper seeks to offer a fresh perspective on how this learned publisher succeeded in establishing his dominance within the Venetian publishing and intellectual milieu from the late fifteenth to the early sixteenth century. To this end, it examines Manutius’ prefaces and dedicatory notes. The purpose is not to extract information about his well-documented entrepreneurial activity, but rather to explore how the publisher himself crafted a distinct identity as part of the humanist culture that emerged in late fifteenth-century Venice. The paper is based on the prefaces and dedicatory notes Manutius composed for his editions of ancient Greek texts – the works for which he is chiefly known. It investigates the humanist rhetorical topoi that Manutius successfully appropriated to establish himself in Venice and to participate as an intellectual in both real and imagined communities of scholars, who were united around ideals such as the revival of the Greco-Roman past, concord, devotion to the public good, generosity, industriousness, and the promotion of humanist studies against scholastic “barbarism”. By situating Manutius’ work within the broader cultural landscape of Renaissance Venice, the paper highlights how print became both a vehicle and a stage for humanist self-fashioning. Drawing on analytical tools from the social and cultural history of the book, as well as on the broader historiographical discussions on the formation of Renaissance subjectivity as a cultural process, this paper offers new insights into Manutius’ legacy.