Printers' Devices in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: Iconographic Sources and Ideological Content

This book discusses the printers' devices used in Poland-Lithuania in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The compositions that served to identify the products of individual printers are explored here as previously unacknowledged research material for cultural studies: they allow for the reconstruction of the mentality of contemporary printers as well as their co-workers and contemporary reading public. The book investigates relationships within early modern intellectual community, and shows that the textual and visual discourses of the printers' marks were pan-European, reflecting the networked communities of European centres of learning and commerce. Being a study on printers' devices this book documents as well a broad range of the output of Poland-Lithuania presses. Thus, it is also a study of book culture in a multinational and multilingual state, whose inheritance is poorly recognised internationally.