The First Reader

After an initial enthusiasm for the invention of printing, the diffusion of reading began to worry humanists, who were concerned about its negative effects. Among the various testimonies, in 1562, the Italian Lodovico Domenichi, author of the Dialoghi, discussed the advantages and disadvantages of typography, spotting as its main failure precisely the exponential growth of harmful and superfluous books. "The forest of books that appears before us like a garden full of many fruits, has in the end few trees to build out of it, of which one is crooked, one is dry, one stings, and the other stinks".

Expurgatory indexes, paradoxically, saved from destruction many medical, juridical, scientific and nautical texts, which were fundamental for countless scholars to stay up-to-date. The selection process involved not condemning to oblivion books which had great cultural value. In fact, among the first readers of significant nautical books there were Holy Office inquisitors.

At the turn of the 16th century, a Portuguese Dominican, Fr. Manuel Coelho, stood out as a reader of an impressive number of works on sea culture (from the famous rutter of the pilot Gaspar Ferreira Reimão to the Naufrágio of Afonso Luís). Coelho’s comments to the books went beyond the mere formalism. As an example, the license given to the book Chronographia repertorio dos tempos, published in 1603, underlined the following characteristics: "This book composed by the mathematician Manuel de Figueiredo (the future 3rd Chief Cosmographer), is very curious because it includes a treatise on the sphere, the art of navigation, rustic astrology, astrology of the times, the construction of astronomical clocks, and other curiosities, which are not contrary to the holy faith, on the contrary, very worthy to be known, and consequently worthy to be published". [Luana Giurgevich]