Anonymity in Eighteenth-Century Italian Publishing : The Absent Author

This book focuses on the use of anonymity in eighteenth-century Italian publishing, a centuries-old practice that has existed everywhere in Europe, but one to which scholars have rarely attached much importance. Various are the reasons why authors choose to publish their works anonymously, including: prudence, fear of censorship, modesty, fear of personal criticism; or simple divertissement, and in many cases an ethical choice, especially for religious figures. Anonymity was not linked exclusively to a logic of control – it did not, in other words, only concern the genres that ecclesiastical censorship had condemned as immoral or irreligious. It also concerned genres with a wide circulation, above all because writing books with a low cultural profile could harm the good name of the author: it was preferable, therefore, to take refuge in anonymity. The Italian case represent a crucial perspective for the study of the anonymity in a European context and contributes to the analysis of a topic to date rarely enquired.