Abstract
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Francesco Berlinghieri's Geographia, an Italian verse paraphrase of Ptolemy's Geography accompanied by thirty-one engraved maps, was printed in Florence in 1482. Through the donation of hand-illuminated copies of the book to the sons of Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II, Bayezid and Cem, it served as an object of cross-cultural interchange between Florence and the Ottoman imperial court in Istanbul. My dissertation provides the first comprehensive treatment of the Geographia and argues that the work's function as an object of international exchange cannot be separated from consideration of concerns often dismissed as parochial by previous scholarship. Print-shop practices, vernacular literary conventions, and Florence's rich tradition of cartographic manuscript production all have broad implications for our understanding of the work's cross-cultural function. Its selection as diplomatic gift is best understood in the context of its utility and meanings for those who routinely produced, read, commissioned and conceived such works. Further, in considering this important printed cartographic work within the larger context of early modern Italian visual culture this project evaluates and problematizes commonplace notions of early printing's claims to accuracy, authority, and standardization. Printed copies of the Geographia exhibit hand-colored maps, illuminated frontispieces, family coats of arms, and other unique modifications. The analysis of such objects is crucial to our understanding of the still contested relationship between manuscript and print cultures in the history of the early modern book. Ultimately, this project contends that technologically and artistically experimental books like the Geographia served, through their modification for eminent buyers and dedicatees, to construct networks of learned, powerful, and wealthy individuals that spanned the early modern Mediterranean.
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