Printing Ausias March

material culture and renaissance poetics

Lloret, Albert

Focused on two sixteenth-century editions of a medieval Valencian author (Ausiàs March, 1400-59), this book examines how the material transformations of early modern poetic texts at different stages in their publication process—from the making of the printer’s copy, to the typesetting and editing of the book in the printing shop—entailed thorough changes in the meaning of March's corpus. Printers Juan Navarro in Valencia and, especially, Carles Amorós in Barcelona were responsible for widely disseminating Ausiàs March’s verses in Renaissance Spain while, at the same time, assimilating March’s works to other distinct poetics of even higher authority and influence. Notwithstanding the discrepancies between both editorial projects—one indebted with cancionero poetry, the other with classical models—the role of Petrarch’s vernacular poetry in the overall shaping of both editions was paramount and reveals the existence of remarkably similar interpretive communities in the intellectual circles of the Duke of Calabria and the Duke of Somma, sponsors of the volumes studied here.