The essay reassesses the ways in which book historians define the politics of early modern publishers by examining a selection of books published during the late 1640s and 1650s by Humphrey Moseley, a prominent London bookseller whom modern scholars have routinely characterized as a Royalist stationer. It argues that starting in 1648 Moseley’s publishing began to shift away from the overt Royalism of his earlier career just as Parliamentary and republican forces were consolidating their victories over King Charles I. From that year onwards, Moseley increasingly published material that repackaged the social, political and cultural values of former Royalists for inclusion within the intellectual and discursive spheres of republican England. His political flexibility during this period of Parliamentary supremacy and republican rule received expression through publishing strategies of contingency, conformity and collaboration. These publishing strategies offer modern scholars a set of critical methods for making sense of seemingly contradictory evidence within the historical archive. Rather than inconsistency, such evidence may signify that a publisher was changing their specialization or simply adapting to the times. With the shifting developments of his career after 1648, Moseley’s example ultimately cautions us against assigning fixed political identities to early modern publishers.

The purpose of the article is to draw attention to Italian riddles of the Renaissance. This publishing and literary genre has been studied especially from ethnological or literary perspectives. What is completely lacking, however, are studies that deal with how this literature was produced, how it circulated and who printed it. These perspectives are highly relevant: they make us realise that such texts were not only produced by the likes of Cervantes, Bembo or Shakespeare, but that riddles were often written, performed and printed by men who are now forgotten, sometimes not fully literate and often not from elites. The intention here is to place these writings in a methodological and historiographical framework that may lead to more in-depth study in the future.

Although the ‘Unions et germanies’ were forbidden, popular movements arose in the Kingdom of Valencia that expressed themselves mainly through judicial means, but sometimes also resorted to arms. Analysis of the actors’ capacity for agency is therefore complex. In particular, the Germania (1519-1522) revalued the participation of the urban majorities in public affairs, based on the armed and legal mobilisation of the city’s artisans. Other grievances throughout the Kingdom of Valencia strengthened the movement. The conflict was radicalised, giving rise to armed actions against privilege that redefined its trajectory. The classist writings of the chroniclers repudiated this collective violence. The adoption of rational choices to achieve objectives reveals the political subjectivity created by the war, which marked the memory of the commoners. A widespread resistance kept alive their banners, which became the cultural substratum of later struggles. The essay rescues the forms assumed by plebeian political identities in the sixteenth-century conflict, inscribing them in the cycle of collective action that began with the Union (1347-1348) and ended with the Second Germania (1693), also comparing the potentialities of these dissimilar experiences.

In the mid-sixteenth century, the study of cosmography was in a state of upheaval in Western Europe, for the European voyages of exploration had disrupted the old ideas of the nature and structure of the world. As a consequence, cosmographers and geographers struggled to accommodate the ever-expanding influx of new empirical knowledge into their works. In the 1550s the Venetian Giovanni Battista Ramusio compiled the Navigationi et viaggi, initiating a new form of geography which endeavoured to present a world cosmography through the eyes of travellers, ideally transmitting the knowledge gained from an age of exploration. In framing his work, Ramusio used both his knowledge of the classics and his humanist editorial skills, while his tests for inclusion derived from attested observation. Over seventy narratives, originally written in a variety of languages, were presented by Ramusio in vernacular Italian and skilfully woven together with intervening Discorsi, written by Ramusio by way of commentary. Ramusio’s forensic editorial skills, mastery in acquiring texts which had hitherto seen little or no printed circulation, diligence in translating, editing and presenting them in an accessible format made his work invaluable. Proposals to republish it in French or English, however, never came to fruition; therefore, scholars had to turn to the vernacular Italian for the information. The article examines how theNavigationi et viaggi became a bedrock of European geographical knowledge examining, in particular, its use by the English geographer John Dee and the French cosmographer royal, André Thevet. It shows how the travellers’ tales, mediated through the hands of a sedentary Venetian, crisscrossed Europe and became fundamental in creating a new geographical understanding dependent on the words of the eyewitness.

Italian contributions to the Enlightenment are most often discussed in terms of the slow acceptance of Newtonian science (Ferrone) or the obstacles to change within a quaint museum of antiquated states (Venturi). This case study of an important naturalist attempts to identify the paths to change between tradition and revolt, in fields of natural knowledge that are sometimes less regarded in the context of an international movement of intellectual emancipation. In spite of an early attachment to some form of physico‑theology, Antonio Vallisneri, professor of medicine at the University of Padua from 1700 to his death in 1730, made a number of innovative contributions to biological description and natural history which placed him among the forerunners of Georges Buffon. Heir to the empirical approach enshrined in the work of Marcello Malpighi, for the most part he attempted to avoid much of the philosophical and theological speculation raging between deists and atheists. However, the implications of his work, including activity as a science communicator to wider audiences, pointed to a reassessment of the importance of accurate natural knowledge in the ongoing reform of public instruction and cultural institutions then occurring in the major cities of Italy and abroad, an important plank in the Enlightenment program in the years leading up to the French Encyclopédie.

The ‘Advice’ drawn up by the College of Physicians for the prevention and cure of the plague was first published in 1578. It was attached to the Orders, a list of directions drawn up by the Privy Council to prevent or limit the spread of the disease. Like the Orders to which it was appended, the ‘Advice’ went through several reprints until 1630, when it had to be rewritten. The 1630 edition of the ‘Advice’ no longer confined itself to medical prescriptions, but included advice about medical provision in the city, the movement of goods and people, and referred to the political measures taken in foreign cities. In this revised, extended version, the ‘Advice’ was reprinted in 1636 and in 1665, when it finally appeared without the preceding Orders. This paper focuses on the pragma-linguistic changes displayed by the 1665 edition as compared with the 1636 edition of the ‘Advice’ in terms of mood and modality (Palmer 1986) and argues that the more mitigated expression of deontic modality and the preference for assertive acts over directive ones (Searle 1985) characterizing the later edition reflect the new editorial and historical context in which the text was produced.