ABSTRACT
The case study that the author explores here, of the early modern Venetian printing trade, is a representative and an exceptional one through which explores questions of masculinity and authority below the political elite. This chapter highlights some of the problems of and questions about popolano masculine authority in early modern Venice. As many contemporaries recognized, the expansion of printing promised to open up literacy and access to information, knowledge, and expression to social groups previously excluded from them, like women and lower-class men. Popular printed manuals and encyclopaedias started to appear, which decoded the arcana of social and professional life for a wide audience. The public sphere began to open up to admit the voices of commentators from outside the political and literary elite. At least before the implementation of widespread print censorship towards the end of the sixteenth century, the press allowed more diverse and contradictory models of authority and masculine conduct to be publicized, discussed, and compared.
