The Medici
Oriental Press:
Knowledge and Cultural Transfer around 1600

The Typographia Medicea is of crucial importance for the understanding of transcultural exchanges between Italy and the «Orient» around 1600. Founded in Rome in 1584 by Cardinal Ferdinando de’ Medici and directed by the mathematician, polymath, and language ‘wizard’ Giovanni Battista Raimondi, the publishing house was the most ambitious attempt devoted to printing with non-Latin letterpress types. The Typographia Medicea published, among others, editions of the Gospels in Arabic and Arabic-Latin, grammars of the Arabic and Syriac languages, and classical Arabic texts on philosophy, geography, and mathematics. 
The present book collects essays on important aspects regarding the foundation of the Typographia, its editorial and commercial activities, and its protagonists and cultural environment. Special attention is given to the intellectual profile and international network of Giovanni Battista Raimondi, while transcripts of newly discovered documents connected to the Medici Press from the archives of Florence, Rome and the Vatican are published and commented on for the first time. They reveal both the global vision and the pitfalls of an exceptional publishing house in the early modern era.