book publishing and the circulation of information 669
highlight the theme of popular literary consumption and, in the process,
greatly influenced similar studies, many of which have continued to
draw on Venetian material.39 While the adjective popular is not an
exact definition for goods that, whatever their original target audience,
enjoyed significant circulation among diverse social groups, it is beyond
doubt that there existed a large body of texts which might have ended
up in anyone’s hands, and much Venetian production consisted of such
material, as the case of the remondini has shown. from the standpoint
of the overall industry, the Bassano printers were certainly an exception,
given the lack of other similar enterprises at the time. one cannot say the
same, however, for the contents of their catalogue, which offered titles of
proven popularity that had long been present not only in theirs but also in
many other publishers’ catalogues from the 16th to early 19th century.
recently, many scholars have looked at this group of long-neglected
questions, particularly because book catalogues have always struggled
to document such texts, given the difficulties in finding works often not
conserved in libraries. in addition, the world of written texts that might
have passed through the hands of someone living between the 16th and
18th centuries was not only constituted by printed books. the previous
pages have already noted the enduring survival of the manuscript in the
particular case of the avvisi, but there were also other genres that endured
for centuries in hand-written form. such was the case of the Clavicula
Salomonis, a title used and reused from the middle ages forward to pro-
pose diverse magical texts of enormous popularity. federico Barbierato’s
studies not only have unveiled the modes of circulation of these works,
omnipresent in 17th-century Venetian inquisitorial cases involving pro-
hibited books, but also have shown their centrality to a world of magical
practices in which elite and popular culture systemically converged.40
Coming back to the printed book, hundreds of devotional works, saints’
lives, chivalric tales, and poems in octave rhyme were considered texts
of transitory consumption, and not necessarily intended for conservation
by their readers. such texts constitute a particularly interesting aspect of
social history, and defining the relationship that developed between these
works and their readers would help to highlight a series of important char-
acteristics and cultural habits in Catholic europe. from the earliest years
39 Carlo ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller
(Baltimore/london, 1982; ital. ed. turin, 1976).
40 federico Barbierato, Nella stanza dei circoli. Clavicula Salomonis e libri di magia a
Venezia nei secoli XVII e XVIII (milan, 2002).