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Typographical Translations: Spanish Refashioning of Lipsius's Politicorum libri sex*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
Abstract
The typographical language of Justus Lipsius's Politicorum libri sex (1589) is a crucial element for understanding its compositio. The page layout, designed by Lipsius (1547–1606) probably in collaboration with his printer, displayed the author's inventive methods and writing strategies. All Latin editions of the Politica followed the precise typographic design of the editio princeps. The work was disseminated across seventeenth-century Europe by different printers without changes to its fundamental material features, including its typography. Something different happened, however, with the various vernacular editions of the Politica. All of them redesigned Lipsius's typography. These editions refashioned the display of sententiae and provided visual uniformity to the page, transforming the text from a compendium of interrelated commonplaces into a dense treatise. In this article I focus on the changes and accommodations evidenced in Bernardino de Mendoza's Spanish translation. In this case, an exceptional document survived that allows one to examine the different interventions in the process of accommodation of the Politica: the printer's copy and the manuscript supervised by Mendoza, approved and licensed by the Council of Castile, and used by the Imprenta Real in Madrid to print Los seis libros de las Políticas (1604).
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- Copyright © 2011 Renaissance Society of America
Footnotes
Earlier versions of this article were presented in the Seminario Interdisciplinar de Estudios sobre Cultura Escrita, at the Universidad de Alcalá in Spain (20 March 2009); the European Society for Textual Scholarship Conference (19–21 November 2009); and “Pruebas de imprenta: simposio sobre la cultura gráfica del libro en la España moderna,” a colloquium at Queen's University in Belfast (12–13 November 2010). I thank the participants for their comments. Thanks also to Jeanine De Landtsheer for a meticulous and generous reading of an earlier draft, and to Roger Chartier and two anonymous RQ readers for their detailed and pertinent comments. Thanks as well to Anne Cruz, Gabriel Sánchez Espinosa, Victoria Pineda, Antonio Castillo, and Nicolás M. Defina for their suggestions. All translations are the author's, except where otherwise noted.
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