EARLY MOD EUR: PRINT & SOCIETY

This course will examine key cultural, political, and religious developments in early modern Western Europe (c. 1500-1800) using the lens of print technology and culture as entry point. From the Reformation of Luther, to the libelles of pre-revolutionary France, from unlocking the mysteries of the human body to those of the heavens, from humanist culture to the arrival of the novel, no important aspect of European culture in the early modern centuries can be understood without taking into account the role of print. Its material aspects, its marketing and distribution channels, and its creation of new readers and new “republics” form the contours of this course.