Printing books of chivalry

external dimension and forms of intervention of an Iberian publishing genre (1501-1623)

Abstract

In this article, we will deal with the printing process of Iberian books of chivalry, having as a temporal delimitation the years 1501 to 1623, privileging, as analytical aspects, their external dimension and the forms of intervention responsible for their conformation. In the first part, we will start with a brief contextualization of the technical nature of the press at the time addressed, and then describe the physical characteristics of this corpus, emphasizing the importance of doing it to understand the meaning that the genre acquired in its time. Still in the same section, we will resort to the concept of 'editorial genre', with the objective of elaborating some reflections on the relevance of the external dimension as a criterion for delimiting the genre of the books of chivalry. In the second section we will deal with the dynamics of the editorial universe, approaching a series of professionals and agents involved, both internal and external to the typographic workshop, as well as their respective functions and its specificities, in order to point out the different forms of intervention of the text and the book involved.