Books and the Production of Knowledge of Normativity in the Age of Early Modern Period: The Case of Martín de Azpilcueta's Manual de Confessores

This chapter provides an introduction to the emblematic and exemplary case study which is the object of this collective volume: Martín de Azpilcueta’s Manual de Confessores. Moreover, it gives the methodological coordinates of the interdisciplinary experiment that has involved the authors of the chapters of this book, who contributed to what we could call a “material approach to legal history”. Coming from history, book history, and legal history, the authors of the book looked at Azpilcueta’s Manual as a material object, according to Robert Darnton’s Communications Circuit, considering both the production, circulation and consumption of it on a global scale. The overall picture sheds some light on the production of knowledge of normativity in the Age of Early Modern Globalisation.