Summary

Printed periodicals constitute sources increasingly used by researchers in the human sciences, as the catalogues of publishers, dossiers of academic journals, and research carried out in graduate programs show. The enormous variety of titles, many of which are easily available thanks to the digitalization programs of the institutions that hold them, seems capable of meeting a wide variety of interests. While heterogeneity is one of the attractions of this type of documentation, it also raises significant challenges for those who use this material as a source, since methodological procedures are subordinated to the specific nature of the selected printed material. Not by chance, wide-ranging works, which propose to cover the history of the press as a whole, have ceded space to monographic works dedicated to in-depth analysis of a single periodical or a restricted number of titles. Cultural and literary periodicals have attracted particular attention from specialists, since they included in their editorial teams combative intellectuals committed to disseminating aesthetic, social, and political postures, which makes these publications privileged vehicles to investigate sensibilities, tastes, themes, and ideas, in short shared readings that help us to understand the dynamics of cultural life at a given moment.