My research focuses on the Medici Oriental Press (“Press”), the first significant Arabic moveable-type printing press, which opened in Rome in 1584. The Press enjoyed a papally-secured monopoly on the printing of “foreign language” texts with the goals, as its mission statements emphasized, of converting non-Christian Arabs and of forging relationships with Arab-Christian communities to extend papal control within the Ottoman Empire. The story of the Medici Oriental Press reveals the complications of global power structures for scholarly work, and the essentially political nature of knowledge production and dissemination. While scholars such as Eckhard Leuschner and Gerhard Wolf have argued that the academic work of the director of the Medici Oriental Press, Giovanni Battista Raimondi, was at odds with the wider proto-colonialist aims of the Catholic Church, I argue that, in fact, he pursued his specific vision of knowledge production as technology to assert Catholic dominance over the Ottoman Empire. Though his intentions were derailed by financial and political struggles, Raimondi's intellectual bent nevertheless demonstrates a continuity with the political and religious aims of the Holy See. Using Raimondi's letters and examining his printing choices and methods of distribution, I explore how he developed the view of Arabic printing specifically as a technology of power and control, contextualized by the Counter-Reformation and a Catholic desire to outpace Protestant knowledge production. These practices constituted the beginning of Orientalist frameworks for understanding the so-called “East” in contrast with the “West.” I argue that scholars have overinterpreted Raimondi's actions as a subversion of the aims of Catholic institutional authority and funders of the Press. Instead, his pursuits furthered claims of “cultural” domination over the Ottoman Empire, which served as a backdrop for later discourses of power.
