WidowsPrint

The project will investigate the effects of the rapid economic change caused by the printing press on the rights and agency of widows. The advent of the printing press spurred crucial intellectual, economic and social developments in early modern Europe. In Germany, the print industry grew faster than in most places and – what has often gone unnoticed – there was a conspicuously high number of widows involved. Yet the exact nature of the industry’s growth, and women’s contribution to it, is extremely difficult to reconstruct because the print runs of different editions of books remain hidden from view.

WidowsPrint will significantly break new ground by filling in these missing pieces. Based on a large array of different archival sources, the project will systematically record all known print runs to create a diverse and representative dataset for early modern Germany. Thus, we can establish which factors determined the size of the print run of an edition and survey the total output of individual print shops. The project will also analyse how widows' economic agency changed in the 16th and 17th century as book production progressively moved from single workshops to larger family enterprises.

A major focus of the project is on reconstructing the professional networks of women book printers, especially their relationships with publishers who financed entire editions and thus increasingly controlled the book production. To this end, the team will use innovative methods, including new image recognition software, which will make it possible to identify the exact same images in different books. These could only have been produced by printers using the same wood blocks or printing plates. This will help the team reveal the previously elusive networks of women printers.