Presentation / Introduction
In 1617, the Lima printer Francisco del Canto released a narrative account on the striking sex transformation of a nun in Úbeda, Spain. The incident happened only a few months earlier, but more than 9,000 kilometers away. The colophon explains that this Relación was originally printed in Seville, and then in Granada, before reaching the printing shop in Lima. Besides the conventual anecdote, this pamphlet also carries –in its textuality– a compelling story to tell: the implicit narrative of a transatlantic journey and the gradual construction of an extended Hispanic network of printed news. These leaflets also bear a significant amount of data on print shops, licenses, censorship, etc. and open important questions on the economic and political value of news-sheets, on postal routes, book-trader networks and material culture.
Colophon. In Relación verdadera de una carta que envió el prior de la Orden de Santa Domingo, de la ciudad de Úbeda, al abad mayor de San Salvador de Granada, de un caso digno de ser avisado… Lima, Francisco del Canto, 1617.
Our Efímero symposium is, in many ways, a continuation of previous academic conversations, like the Humanities Lab we organized at Stony Brook University in 2019. This time the conversation will loosely follow a script emailed to our guest participants a month before the event. The aim is to promote a spontaneous dialogue on current research issues, projects and collaborations, as well as to develop some conceptual tools to improve our textual and contextual analysis of Early Modern news-sheets and pamphlets..
Here is the basic script that will guide our conversation:
- Informal brief presentations on individual current research.
- Changes in the last decades in Hispanic Early Modern media studies.
- Methods and case studies.
- History of printers and print shops and their agents. Pamphlets vs. books.
- Philology today. Modern editions of news-sheets and relaciones de sucesos.
- Digital reading, data mining, network visualizations.
- Book censorship structure and printed news.
- Pan-European, Transatlantic, Interamerican scenarios.
- Recommendations and projects.
Despite the fact that printers massively produced loose-sheets (pliegos sueltos), these were rarely held in libraries or preserved in archives in their times. Therefore, the study of pamphlets and new-sheets has traditionally faced the problem of insufficient data and scant primary sources. This situation has significantly improved in the last decades thanks to digital libraries and online catalogues (i. e. CBDRS). The digital revolution and its concomitant online disinformation have also sparked interest in the history of media and the rhetoric of information.
Finally, although we will be discussing Early Modern material, the current media scenario is also a constant point of reflection (and deflection) in our academic work. The words efímero (in Spanish) or ephemera (English) were more frequently used in the mid-eighteen century, as can be seen in the chart below (Ngram Viewer Google Books), yet the concepts behinds those words –transformed by technology– have permeated our present lives of screens and virtual reality. Our digital age has shaped the most extensive archive ever imagined in human history and, at the same time, the most volatile in its nature. It has also produced new ways of reading and perhaps consolidated a new culture of the ephemeral: una cultura sólida de lo efímero.
Paul Firbas