The Career of Alfonso Ulloa (1529-1570) in Early Modern Venice : A Cosmopolitan Outlook of the 16th-Century Book Trade

This chapter re-evaluates the artifacts and translations associated with a Spanish intermediary, Alfonso de Ulloa (1529–1570), who lived in an age of Christian-Muslim relations and had a deep impact on the Venetian press’s policies of inclusion/exclusion and on the city’s self-fashioning as a capital of the book industry. Moving among envoys and Inquisition officers, Ulloa is a great case study of the brokering of citizenship in a multi-ethnic urban environment and of the bricolage of Iberian memory and ideology as well. By placing an agent against urban practices, one can narrow a divide between the historiography on mobility, journeymen-printers, and commercial connectors; by focusing on a multipolar figure such as Ulloa, moreover, one can also generate a new appreciation for the palimpsestic nature of the imperial philologies he was variously associated with.