An Enigmatic German Printer in Renaissance Florence: Niccolò di Lorenzo della Magna

Abstract

Niccolò di Lorenzo della Magna and the Social World of Florentine Printing, ca. 1470–1493. By LORENZ BÖNINGER. (I Tatti Studies in Italian Renaissance History.) Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 2021. vi + 209 pp. $49.95. ISBN 978 0 674 25113 7. LORENZ BÖNINGER IS AN INDEPENDENT GERMAN SCHOLAR who has spent the last few decades delving slowly and patiently through the medieval and Renaissance documents in the State Archive in Florence. There is no shortage of material. The Notarile antecosimiano, for instance, or the legal archive that takes its name from the real establishment of the Medici state by Duke Cosimo I (1519–74, reigned from 1537; the archive takes as a watershed 1569, when he acquired the title of Grand Duke), holds 21,488 volumes from the whole of Tuscany (and this is just the lawyers). Palaeo graphical skills, honed with time and practice, are often required to decipher the crabbed legal scripts, usually hirsute with abbreviations. When in the present work Böninger remarks that a document is difficult to read, more usual parlance would most likely describe it as a horrible, illegible scrawl. Articles in either German or Italian, illustrating the progress of his research, have been appearing over the last twenty years or so, while some of his most signifi cant discoveries are brought together in the present monograph, which he has made a huge effort to write directly in English. Böninger has a particular devotion for one of Florence’s first printers, denomi nated in GW/ISTC in Latinate style as Nicholaus Laurentii, or Nicholas, the son of Laurence (there may be something in a name), who signed the colophons of his books variously as ‘per me Nicholaum Florentiae’ (1477), ‘per me Nicolaum Alamanum’ (1483), and ‘per me Nicholo di Lorenzo della Magna’ (1486): i.e. he came from Germany and was happy to advertise the fact.1 Modernized, this last version appears in the title of the present work; on the other hand, to avoid making a mouthful