Ephemeral City

The book follows the flood of cheap print (pamphlets, fliers and broadsheets) that streamed from Venetian presses from the late fifteenth century - the most visible and accessible products of the press, often peddled in the streets and declaimed by public performers. Closely intertwined with oral culture, such texts helped to open up new publics for literature, providing information and entertainment to diverse audiences and transforming the city into an epicentre of vernacular literature and performance. Examining the ways in which the production and dissemination of cheap print infiltrated the Venetian urban environment and changed the course of the city's cultural life, the book also traces how local authorities sought to channel these flows by escalating censorship and control over the course of the sixteenth century.

The book will be of interest to scholars and students of early modern European and Italian Renaissance culture and society and the history of the book and communication.