This edited volume explores the development of the European book world between 1650 and 1750, concentrating on changes in publishing strategies, practices of censorship, the circulation of second-hand books and the building of libraries. Its essays discuss this critical, but much neglected period of print history through case studies from Spain, Italy, France, the Holy Roman Empire, Britain and the Netherlands. Ranging from the posthumous publication of Galileo to the regulation of the book auction market, this volume demonstrates that the century between 1650 and 1750 was a transformative period for the history of the printed book.

The essays in Private Libraries and their Documentation revolve around the users and contents of early modern private book collections, and around the sources used to document and study these collections. They take the reader from large-scale projects on historical book ownership to micro-level research conducted on individual libraries, and from analyses of specific types of primary sources to general typologies and overviews by period and by region. As a result of its comparative approach and active engagement with questions regarding the nature, selection and accessibility of sources, the volume serves as a guide to sources and resources in different regions as well as to state-of the-art methods and interpretational approaches. Publication of this volume in open access was made possible by the Ammodo KNAW Award 2017 for Humanities.

State Communication and Public Politics in the Dutch Golden Age describes the political communication practices of the authorities in the early modern Netherlands. Der Weduwen provides an in-depth study of early modern state communication: the manner in which government sought to inform its citizens, publicise its laws, and engage publicly in quarrels with political opponents. These communication strategies, including proclamations, the use of town criers, and the printing and affixing of hundreds of thousands of edicts, underpinned the political stability of the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. Based on systematic research in thirty-two Dutch archives, this book demonstrates for the first time how the wealthiest, most literate, and most politically participatory state of early modern Europe was shaped by the communication of political information. It makes a decisive case for the importance of communication to the relationship between rulers and ruled, and the extent to which early modern authorities relied on the active consent of their subjects to legitimise their government.

Readership: Readers with an interest in the European Enlightenment; intellectual and cultural historians; scholars and students of philosophy.

Since its launch in 1987, the History of Cartography series has garnered critical acclaim and sparked a new generation of interdisciplinary scholarship. Cartography in the European Enlightenment, the highly anticipated fourth volume, offers a comprehensive overview of the cartographic practices of Europeans, Russians, and the Ottomans, both at home and in overseas territories, from 1650 to 1800. The social and intellectual changes that swept Enlightenment Europe also transformed many of its mapmaking practices. A new emphasis on geometric principles gave rise to improved tools for measuring and mapping the world, even as large-scale cartographic projects became possible under the aegis of powerful states. Yet older mapping practices persisted: Enlightenment cartography encompassed a wide variety of processes for making, circulating, and using maps of different types. The volume’s more than four hundred encyclopedic articles explore the era’s mapping, covering topics both detailed—such as geodetic surveying, thematic mapping, and map collecting—and broad, such as women and cartography, cartography and the economy, and the art and design of maps. Copious bibliographical references and nearly one thousand full-color illustrations complement the detailed entries.

V.1-12 Micropaedia: Ready reference -- V.13-29 Macropaedia: Knowledge in depth -- V.[30] Propaedia: Outline of knowledge -- V.[31] Index, A-K -- V.[32] Index, L-Z.