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Document Details :

Title: Authorizing Hellenism
Subtitle: Early Greek Typography and the Reconstruction of Greek Identity
Author(s): RAISCH, Jane
Journal: Lias
Volume: 44    Issue: 1   Date: 2017   
Pages: 29-57
DOI: 10.2143/LIAS.44.1.3248500

Abstract :
This article explores early Greek type design (1490-1515) as a form of mobile identity reconstruction for Byzantine exiles living in Italy after the fall of Constantinople. In examining the interplay between the technical and the cultural, I reveal how the rhetoric surrounding Greek type design, as well as the appearance of typefaces themselves, present textual and alphabetic materiality as revivifying access to a Greek past. In doing so, I approach these prefatory texts as more than repositories of evidence for the practices and procedures of early Greek print. Instead, I illuminate their status as cultural and literary documents that recast Greek type design as a dynamic project of cultural reimagination.

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