L’anonymat dans l’édition italienne du XVIIIe siècle et le défi du Dizionario di opere anonime e pseudonime de Gaetano Melzi (1848-1859)
Abstract
The topic of the seminar addresses a relevant issue in the history of the book: the choice made by many authors to publish their works anonymously. This was a practice that spanned centuries and was present across Europe, but its importance has been rarely considered by scholars of literary criticism, intellectual history, or book history. The analysis of Italian eighteenth-century publishing shows that the use of anonymity has always different motivations, which can be identified either in the political and cultural context in which it is expressed, in the personal needs of the individual author (for authors belonging to a religious order, it is often an ethical matter), or in the genre to which the work belongs (as is the case with novels), or in issues related to censorship.
The second part of the seminar aims to make some observations on the cultural conditions that allowed the organisation of Dizionario di opere anonime e pseudonime di scrittori italiani o come che sia aventi relazione all'Italia, by Gaetano Melzi (Milan, 1848-1859), showing, by means of a few examples, how Melzi worked and how functioned his “workshop” for the collection of titles and attributions, in which many booksellers, librarians, bibliophiles and scholars of various disciplines, both Italian and foreign, collaborated. It was a true network, of which we present here some aspects related to the methodology with which Melzi gathered information and gave directions to his collaborators.
Lodovica Braida is Full Professor of History of Publishing at the University of Turin. Her research topics concern the history of book and reading practices in Ancient Regime Europe and the history of Italian publishing in modern and contemporary times. She had been the president of Centro APICE (2018-2024) of the University of Milan, a center that collects the archives of contemporary Italian publishers and authors.
Among her publications are Stampa e cultura in Europa tra XV e XVI secolo, Roma-(Bari: Laterza, 2000, 202120); Libri di lettere. Le raccolte epistolari del Cinquecento tra inquietudini religiose e ‘buon volgare’ (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2009); Lire en Europe. Textes, Formes, Lectures (XVIIIe-XXIe siècle), eds. L. Braida and B. Ouvry-Vial, (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2020); Anonymity in Eighteenth Century Italian Publishing. The Absent Author (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022); Le donne nell’editoria del Novecento. Archivi, memorie, autorappresentazioni, eds. L. Braida, I. Piazzoni, (Vicenza: Ronzani, 2024).