book publishing and the circulation of information 663
another important mediterranean outlet was the levant. from the
16th to the 18th century, 80 per cent of books printed with greek charac-
ters came from Venice. several greek publishers, residing in Venice and
specializing in the production of liturgical texts for the orthodox church,
were consistently among the greatest book entrepreneurs of the later 17th
and 18th centuries. these same publishers were also engaged in printing
texts in the slavic languages, which they circulated from the Balkans to
moscow while hiding their Venetian origins behind false origins in mos-
cow or st Petersburg.
the enlightenment brought still more profound transformations. the
1760s saw a quite rapid decline of religious book production which, as
already noted, had been a cornerstone of the market. the crisis of the
Jesuit order, first expelled from the iberian and Bourbon realms in 1773
by Pope Clement XiV, had particularly notable consequences in Venice,
as nearly one-third of religious book demand was suddenly lost. other
problems derived from the suppression of many convents and a general
secularization of society, not to mention the heightened competition both
within italy and abroad and the increasing copyright infringements that
accompanied it.
the new context clearly reflected the contradictions between the book
production that characterized the enlightenment and that of the Counter
reformation, which had been the principal engine in Venetian publish-
ing during the previous half century. a more secular society drove a dif-
ferent demand that publishers did everything possible to satisfy, though
such efforts could not compensate for losses in the religious book sector.
these were decades characterized by interesting experiments in many
directions; novels, series dealing with current events, french and eng-
lish translations, gazettes, journals, almanacs, pamphlets of every sort,
“enlightened” essays, and theatrical collections all contributed to a great
renewal of publishers’ catalogues and was a fact often noted by foreigners
coming to Venice.
But there was also another important phenomenon that helped ring
in the changes in Venetian publishing. from the second half of the 16th
century, there developed an increasing number of smaller publishers
whose products sold big on purely local markets, and this european trend
took root in smaller italian centers as well. these materials were repetitive,
cheap to produce, and of interest to all parts of society: booklets for prayer
or for school, almanacs and lunar calendars, and images both religious and
profane which were generally sold at fairs of little concern to major pub-
lishers. nonetheless, such texts played a crucial role among low-literacy