Stephanie Leitch

The Imprint of Moveable Types: the Copy and the Adjustable Feather Skirt

The Imprint of Moveable Types: the Copy and the Adjustable Feather Skirt

Early modern printers enabled the mass-distribution of information that shaped both the production of knowledge and fake news through text and image. A fictive feather skirt worn by native Americans in early German printings of Amerigo Vespucci’s account, for example, became one of the best-known exports of the early modern press. Although this artifact was originally invented to denote cannibals, by the close of the century, it came to signal ingenuity in resource management that also carried with it a cachet of abundance. This talk weighs printers’ complicity in establishing targets for conquest through an intermedial journey that moveable types took through copies that appeared in travel narratives, print series, and court festivals. 

Stephanie Leitch is Professor of Art History at Florida State University, where she specializes in early modern European art, with a focus on the Renaissance and Germany and the history of printmaking. Her work explores how early modern prints and printed books construct and circulate visual information about peoples, places, and objects within the broader cultural and material contexts of their production. She holds a BA in art history from Princeton University as well as an MA and a PhD in art history from the University of Chicago. Leitch is the author of Early Modern Print and the Art of Observation: Training a Literate Eye (Cambridge, 2024) and the award-winning Mapping Ethnography in Early Modern Germany: New Worlds in Print Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

Leitch has received numerous awards for her work, including from the American Council on Learned Societies, a scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and a William Reese Company Fellow in the Print Culture of the Americas from the University of Minnesota.