The Mediterranean Bookspace:
Mapping the Sea's Incunabula, 1452-1502

The advent of the printing press has long been seen as a radical event in the historiography of early modern Europe. While text had always played a central role in codifying and diffusing social ideas and identities, the press fundamentally changed the manner in which readers engaged with the written word. Within two decades of Johannes Guttenberg's earliest publication, the number of sheets being printed across Europe already exceeded the number of sheets in handwritten manuscripts. Despite a number of compelling narratives that have been offered for this watershed moment, the spatial dimensions of the printing industries development have gone largely unexplored. This paper offers a new approach to the history of the book by examining the importance of the Mediterranean in the opening decades of European printing.