The Ethics of Typography in the Erasmian Festina Lente

This essay proposes an exercise of detailed and contextual reading of the Erasmian adage Festina lente, which contains a cultural diagnosis of Aldus Manutius as a prominent historical actor within a motley Venetian cohort of printing personae ranging from humanists to street peddlers. While the central sections are taken, successively, by Roman antiquarian themes, bibliophilic assessment, and the epistemic problem of marginalia in a Byzantine lexicon consulted by Erasmus while in Venice, the introduction and conclusion further expand the results of this localized inquiry by raising the early modern problem of expertise and following the idea of Herculean printing in Erasmus as a pedagogical and philosophical model.