The York Research Database

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.