The Renaissance in Print: 1500-1650
The Renaissance in Print
Rare books from the Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies
When Johannes Gutenberg introduced movable metal type in the 1450s, he could not have foreseen the profound and lasting transformation this technology would bring to Europe. The printing press accelerated the spread of humanist scholarship, enabled the circulation of Reformist theology, reshaped scientific inquiry, and altered the conduct of politics, warfare, education, and household devotion. Yet the impact of print was never uniform. It touched elite and everyday life alike, making possible new forms of learning, persuasion, debate, and imagination.
This digital exhibit brings together a selection of early printed books and printed artifacts from the CRRS collections materials produced between roughly 1500 and 1650 to demonstrate the extraordinary range of ways in which print mediated Renaissance culture. Designed by students in REN442: The Renaissance Book, the exhibit highlights how printers, readers, and artists across Europe deployed the press to revive classical antiquity, to cultivate piety, to develop architectural theory, and to reimagine politics.
Visitors will encounter Machiavelli’s Prince in a Venetian edition, where political authority and moral controversy meet, as well as Aelian’s Roman military formations, represented in complex typographical diagrams. The exhibit also includes important works of lay devotion, such as a heavily annotated copy of John Ball’s Puritan catechism, designed for household instruction, and a richly illustrated Lutheran Hauspostilla used by families for weekly religious reading.
Other items reveal the cultural breadth of Renaissance print. Philip Galle’s engraved portraits of biblical women visualize an early modern ideal of female virtue, later censored as tastes and moral expectations shifted. The “international book” represented by William Lily and Latin grammar, produced through collaboration among English scholars, a Dutch humanist, and a Basel printer, underscores the cosmopolitan circuits of Renaissance learning. Architectural theory appears in an unauthorized French translation of Serlio’s Regles generales, demonstrating both the authority and commercial appeal of the era’s “starchitects.”
Taken together, these objects illustrate not only the technical ingenuity of early printers but also the ways print reshaped the intellectual, devotional, and imaginative life of early modern Europe. They invite us to see print culture as a vibrant, contested, and profoundly collaborative enterprise that transformed how people read, learned, worshipped, and understood their world.
Exhibit Credits: Louise McCrow, Clara Mociani, Sera Tulk, Lisa Saeki, Cameron Arshia, and Madelaine Smith