Cristina Dondi, of the University of Oxford and the Secretary of the Consortium of European Research Libraries (CERL), has been awarded a European Research Council Consolidator Grant for her project: "The 15th-century Book Trade: An Evidence-based Assessment and Visualization of the Distribution, Sale, and Reception of Books in the Renaissance".

The idea that underpins the project is to use the material evidence from thousands of surviving books, as well as unique documentary evidence — the unpublished ledger of a Venetian bookseller in the 1480s which records the sale of 25,000 printed books with their prices — to address four fundamental objectives relating to the introduction of printing in the West which have so far eluded scholarship, partly because of lack of evidence, partly because of the lack of effective tools to deal with existing evidence. The book trade differs from other trades operating in the medieval and early modern periods in that the goods traded survive in considerable numbers. Not only do they survive, but many of them bear stratified evidence of their history in the form of marks of ownership, prices, manuscript annotations, binding and decoration styles. The database Material Evidence in Incunabula, conceived by Cristina Dondi, developed by Alex Jahnke of Data Conversion Group, hosted and maintained by CERL, gathers together this kind of evidence for thousands of surviving 15th-c. printed books. For the first time, this makes it possible to track the circulation of books, their trade routes and later collecting, across Europe and the USA, and throughout the centuries.

The objectives of the project are to examine (1) the distribution and trade-routes, national and international, of 15th-c. printed books, along with the identity of the buyers and users (private, institutional, religious, lay, female, male, and by profession) and their reading practices; (2) the books' contemporary market value; (3) the transmission and dissemination of the texts they contain, their survival and their loss (rebalancing potentially skewed scholarship); and (4) the circulation and re-use of the illustrations they contain. Finally, the project will experiment with the application of scientific visualization techniques to represent, geographically and chronologically, the movement of 15th-c. printed books and of the texts they contain.

The Grant, of the duration of five years, will therefore enable a significant expansion and enhancement of the database Material Evidence in Incunabula (MEI), the enhancement of the Incunabula Short Title Catalogue (ISTC), the study of the day-book of a 15th-century Venetian bookseller recording the sale of 25,000 printed books with their prices (with Prof. Neil Harris), cataloguing the incunabula collection of St Petersburg National Library book in hand, the creation of a new database to research the corpus of texts printed in the 15th century (modelled on the Bodleian's Bod-inc), experimenting with the application of image-matching software to 15th-century illustration, and of scientific visualization techniques to MEI data, that is applied to the distribution and use of books. Three post-doctoral research positions and one DPhil will be advertised during the first half of 2014.

The European Research Council (ERC) is a European funding initiative, designed to support the best scientists, engineers and scholars in Europe. Its mandate is to encourage the highest quality research in Europe, selected by peer review evaluation, through competitive funding and to support investigator-initiated frontier research across all fields of research, on the basis of scientific excellence.