This is the third of four volumes which trace the history of the later Crusades and papal relations with the Levant from the accession of Innocent III (in 1198) to the reign of Pius V and the battle of Lepanto (1566-1571). From the mid-fourteenth century to the conclusion of his work, the author has drawn heavily upon unpublished materials, collected in the course of more than twenty "palaeographical journeys" to the Archivio Segreto Vaticano and the Archivi di Stato in Venice, Mantua, Modena, Milan, Siena, Florence, and the Archives of the Order of the Hospitallers at Malta. Volumes 1, II, and IV are available at www.amphilsoc.org.

This open access volume focuses on the cultural background of the pivotal transformations of scientific knowledge in the early modern period. It investigates the rich edition history of Johannes de Sacrobosco’s Tractatus de sphaera, by far the most widely disseminated textbook on geocentric cosmology, from the unique standpoint of the many printers, publishers, and booksellers who steered this text from manuscript to print culture, and in doing so transformed it into an established platform of scientific learning. The corpus, constituted of 359 different editions featuring Sacrobosco’s treatise on cosmology and astronomy printed between 1472 and 1650, represents the scientific European shared knowledge concerned with the cosmological worldview of the early modern period until far after the publication of Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium coelestium in 1543. The contributions to this volume show how the academic book trade influenced the process of homogenization of scientific knowledge. They also describe the material infrastructure through which such knowledge was disseminated, and thus define the premises for the foundation of modern scientific communities.

The five hundred years from the 1450s to the 1950s represent an extraordinarily rich quarry for evidence of incunabula sales, collecting, and use. What book lists reveal about publishing and reading habits in late-fifteenth-century Venice, how a Scottish librarian went about acquiring incunabula during World War II, and the international workshop connections glimpsed through early Hungarian bindings are among the topics explored in this volume. Library professionals aim spotlights on French plague tracts, Deventer as a printing place, the use of incunabula in learned societies in the nineteenth century, and incunabula collecting by monks and universities in England and Scotland.