Adriana Alessandrini. 
Il libro a stampa e la cultura del Rinascimento: Un’indagine sulle biblioteche fiorentine negli anni 1470-1520.
Biblioteche e archivi, 35; RICABIM. Texts and studies, 3. Florence: SISMEL – Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2018. XXVI + 340 pp. €160. 

This impressive volume constitutes an essential contribution to the history of the circulation of printed books in Italy in the early typographic age. Adriana Alessandrini focuses her work on the Florentine libraries between 1470 and 1520. The author selects this time frame for two reasons: first, because this period defines the investigation on which the documentary repertory RICABIM is based, from which Alessandrini obtains the sources that form the core of her work. Secondly, because in those years the printing industry developed exponentially in Italy, giving readers the opportunity to expand their book collections with new bibliographic products. In the Introduction, Alessandrini explains the objectives and analytical criteria of her work. The author has selected 34 catalogues, lists of books and inventories of private and religious Florentine libraries listed in the first volume of the aforementioned RICABIM repertory, relating to the libraries of Tuscany. Through the systematic study of these documents she has built a tool capable of offering a detailed overview of the circulation of written culture in Renaissance Florence.

In the essay ‘Il libro a stampa nelle biblioteche fiorentine (1470-1520)’ (pp. 1-40) the author first provides a very detailed description of the morphology of the book lists taken into consideration. In the second section of her contribution, Alessandrini describes the different classifications of the books within the libraries examined. The last part of the essay consists of a series of statistical analyses devoted to verifying the presence of printed books in Florentine libraries between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when the Medici city was still considered the most important center of manuscript book production in Italy. In this regard, it is very interesting to observe how the ancient libraries of the religious orders were the most reluctant institutions to open up to printed books, while the private libraries of intellectuals and merchants housed many of the new bibliographic products. In this context, the thirteen tables and twelve graphs that the author inserts as an appendix to her extensive essay can be considered as extremely useful tools to navigate the vast amount of information provided in the following section of the book.

The second part of the volume consists of the Repertory of records describing in detail the sources analyzed, which are structured according to an analytical criterion aimed at bringing out each element related to the library list examined. The first part of each record contains information about the document's dating and the essential data about the owner of the book collection taken into consideration. The second section contains all the information that characterizes the structure of the document as a whole: language, layout of the text in the document, a narrative description of the source, original titles of the works, distinction between manuscripts and printed books, notes of provenance and many other elements useful to highlight the peculiarities of the individual document.

The last part of the volume contains the Catalogue of the authors and editions. In this part of the work, the author identifies the individual editions listed in the documents discussed in the second section of the book. For each work, Alessandrini indicates the editio princeps adding some information about the fortune of the text. The record then provides a transcription of the entry relating to the specific work. Among the many interesting data, it is useful to notice that Dante’s Commedia is the vernacular literary work with the highest number of records (14), followed by Boccaccio’s Decameron (4), and Petrarch’s Canzoniere (3) and Trionfi (3); a clear sign of how, even at the end of the fifteenth century, in Florence, Dante was still considered the Tuscan poet par excellence. Although the last part of the catalogue is dedicated to unidentifiable editions, one can hypothesize about the identification of some of the titles transcribed by Alessandrini. The “Landulfus” belonged to the Dominican friar Giorgio Antonio Vespucci is very likely one of the many printed editions of Ludolph von Saxon’s Vita Christi, while the “Mombrino bombitio” held in the library of Lorenzo di Domenico Franceschi should be the 1477 Milanese edition of Boninus Mombritius’s Vitae Sanctorum.

This truly remarkable volume concludes with a series of very useful tools: a documentary appendix with the transcription of some unpublished book inventories, a rich bibliography, and a series of indexes related to: 144 identified copies, anonymous authors and texts, publishers and printers, places of printing, owners, and documentary sources.

Natale Vacalebre, University of Pennsylvania