Le donne del libro. Il ruolo delle donne nella produzione e nel commercio del libro a Lione nel XVI secolo

The presence of women in the business of printing and trading books during the Renaissance has not been so far the subject of systematic studies aimed at ascertaining women’s actual role in the management of printing works and publishing enterprises. Yet there is ample evidence of women’s active presence in book-related professions, which widens the interpretative horizons as regards the working contexts, the strategies, the networks of professional and personal relationships in which they acted as protagonists, sidekicks, or capable and trustworthy collaborators overshadowed by fathers, husbands or other male figures. The above-mentioned evidence, retrieved from archives and libraries, has provided the basis for a process of in-depth investigation of three female figures who played essential roles in running their family-owned printing and publishing enterprises in Sixteenth-Century Lyon: Jeanne Giunta, Sibylle de La Porte, Denise Barbou. This study scrutinizes not only the lives of these remarkable women, but also the characteristics of their publishing activity, the iconographic apparatuses and the publishers’ devices in the printed volumes, the printing privileges, the published authors. The annals of these women publishers are provided at the end of the chapters devoted to each one of them. The emerging picture, albeit limited in scope and needing further investigation, highlights not only the personal commitment of these women but also their uncommon entrepreneurial skills.