This chapter examines the parts that women in Renaissance Italy played, directly or indirectly, in promoting scribal or print publication without their necessarily having a commercial interest in the process. The first section deals with the role in which they were most active, that of self-publisher, investigating the steps that they took to diffuse their own texts, in manuscript or in print. The second section considers two ways in which women contributed to the publication of texts composed by others. In the first of these types of involvement, which was similarly an active one, women occasionally promoted works written by men because they had a personal interest in the writings, out of religious or cultural solidarity. In the second and much more widespread type, individual women were invoked as dedicatees of a work because it was considered, for a variety of reasons, that the publication of the work would benefit from their being connected with it. In most cases a dedicatee's willingness to give consent to a dedication would have been ascertained in advance. 1 Even if a woman's involvement in the publication of a work went no further than according such permission, and her role as patron was thus not necessarily a very active one, the dedicator's decision to select a woman as dedicatee was socially significant for her, and above all it could have a strong influence on the reader's perception of the work. 1 For two examples of preliminary enquiries about a dedication, and an example of an apology for not having made a request for permission, see Richardson, Manuscript Culture in Renaissance Italy, pp. 219-20. Paolo Manuzio felt unable to print Silvan Cattaneo's Dodici giornate in 1551 because the Venetian patrician Marco Antonio da Mula had not provided a formal 'commissione' (instruction) to state that he would act as dedicatee: