(Im)printing the event: the printing press as mass medium between Italy and Germany (origins-1515)

The conference will explore the question of the relationship between events and the printing press from its advent around 1450 to about 1515.
Beginning with the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the most diverse events were accompanied [and recorded] by printed and illustrated material.
These ranged from calendars, papal bulls, indulgences and proclamations to publications of diplomatic writings, meetings and festivities.
Information on natural disasters, miraculous phenomena, prognostications, pamphlets, war and pilgrimage reports also were printed, often in the form of broadsides and pamphlets, some of which
were illustrated with woodcuts.

The conference will explore how printed materials functioned as media, how they shaped the way events were perceived and interpreted, whether they gave meaning or distorted it, how they steered the course of events, and how the news market changed printing itself.

The conference is organized by the FBK Library, FBK-Istituto storico italo-germanico, Università del Sacro cuore (Milano) e Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. The conference is co-funded by DFG-Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the PRIN 2017 “The Dawn of Italian Publishing. Technology, Texts, and Books in Central and Northern Italy in the 15th and 16th Centuries.”

Event in Italian and English without simultaneous translation.

Image: Engraving of Albrecht Dürer The Little Courier (National Gallery of Art, Washington DC); original image CC0