Ephemeral print and lay religious experience in early modern Venice

Abstract: In the church of San Martino in Venice, a large broadsheet is affixed to the wall at each side of the altar in the chapel of the crucifixion, framed in stucco, and offers a summary of the perpetual indulgences which can be obtained by worshippers at this altar. Broadsheets, pamphlets, forms and slips were widely used for religious purposes in early modern Venice, but scholars have paid limited attention to religious print after the mid-sixteenth century, to the use of print to organise everyday devotion, and to how print’s visual qualities were used to communicate religious messages. This paper explores how lay Catholics encountered religious print in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It examines how print’s uses in the religious sphere were shaped by Venice’s position as a major printing centre and by the Venetian Republic’s use of print for administrative purposes. Through combining an analysis of the content of printed ephemera with its textual, visual, and material characteristics, as well as marks of ownership, this paper seeks to reconstruct ephemeral print’s role in the religious lives of lay Catholics.

About the speaker: Alex Bamji is Associate Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Leeds, and Director of the Leeds Arts and Humanities Research Institute. Her research focuses on religious reform, death and disease, and draws on a wide range of sources and methodologies to explore lived experience in early modern society.

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Refreshments (tea and coffee) provided 15 minutes before the advertised start time. Lunchtime seminar refreshments also include sandwiches. All welcome!