Privilege and Power

The advent of printing in early modern Europe gave rise to new questions concerning the regulation and circulation of knowledge. Against this backdrop, political and religious authorities began granting privileges that conferred temporary exclusive rights of publication and thus bore some resemblance to modern copyright. These grants protected printers and authors and often had a clearly commercial purpose. Yet they also determined who could print what, where, and under what conditions, thereby playing an important role in the dissemination of knowledge throughout early modern Europe.

Edited by Marius Buning, Alberto Campillo Pardo, and Andrea Ottone, Privilege and Power brings together new perspectives on the operation of printing privileges in early modern Europe. The individual chapters explore how these exclusive grants interacted with licensing, censorship, and patronage, and how publishers and authors exploited jurisdictional boundaries and legal loopholes within the system. Spanning the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, the volume traces the history of the printing privilege as a regulatory instrument across a broad spectrum of printed materials, including liturgical books, schoolbooks, maps, music, and the earliest newspapers.

Privilege and Power is a valuable resource for anyone interested in the intersections between the histories of knowledge, print, law, religion, and politics.