Patronage was of great importance for the printing and distributing of books in the early modern period in several ways. Not only could a benefactor's financial support keep an author alive and get his works into print in the first place, his messengers and, more generally, his diplomatic channels could also be used to help spread the books.
In return for the patronage, or in order to commend themselves preemptively, authors often dedicated their works to the patron and/or had them included in their frontispieces. As an artistically designed graphical title page preceding the actual title page of the book, the frontispiece was thus perfectly tailored in order to represent and impress.
In this talk, I would like to take a look at what this meant in the case of Jesuit mathematical textbooks and examine the depiction of patronage for some chosen examples.