Investigating the interrelationships between orality and writing in elite and popular textual culture in early modern Italy, this volume shows how the spoken or sung word on the one hand, and manuscript or print on the other hand, could have interdependent or complementary roles to play in the creation and circulation of texts.
The first part of the book centres on performances, ranging from realizations of written texts to improvisations or semi-improvisations that might draw on written sources and might later be committed to paper. Case studies examine the poems sung in the piazza that narrated contemporary warfare, commedia dell’arte scenarios, and the performative representation of the diverse spoken languages of Italy. The second group of essays studies the influence of speech on the written word and reveals that, as fourteenth-century Tuscan became accepted as a literary standard, contemporary non-standard spoken languages were seen to possess an immediacy that made them an effective resource within certain kinds of written communication. The third part considers the roles of orality in the worlds of the learned and of learning.
The book as a whole demonstrates that the borderline between orality and writing was highly permeable and that the culture of the period, with its continued reliance on orality alongside writing, was often hybrid in nature.
Table of Contents:
Contents: Introduction, Luca Degl’Innocenti and Brian Richardson. Part I Oral Performances and Written Texts: Oral and manuscript cultures in early modern Italy, Peter Burke; Paladins and captains: chivalric clichés and political propaganda in early modern Italian war poems, Luca Degl’Innocenti; Performance, print, and the Italian wars: poemetti bellici and the case of Eustachio Celebrino’s La presa di Roma, Jessica Goethals; Ahimé, ahi, o, deh: interjections and orality in lamenti during the Italian wars, Florence Alazard; Orality and print: singing in the street in early modern Venice, Iain Fenlon; Levels of orality in the published scenarios of Flaminio Scala, Richard Andrews; Theories on linguistic variety in Renaissance Italy: between regional identities and oral performance, Chiara Sbordoni. Part II Functions of Orality in the Written Word: Orality, literacy, and historiography in Neapolitan vernacular urban chronicles of the 15th and 16th centuries, Chiara De Caprio and Francesco Senatore; And the voice of the people climbed Parnassus: lingua napolitana from street dialect to canon, Lorenza Gianfrancesco; Traces of orality in Machiavelli’s prose, Jean-Louis Fournel; Nature versus grammar: Annibal Caro’s apologia as a manifesto for orality, Stefano Jossa. Part III Orality, the Learned, and Learning: Not by books alone: the spoken life of the learned, Françoise Waquet; Oral, manuscript, and printed circulation: the many lives of Benedetto Varchi’s lectures in the Accademia degli Infiammati of Padua, Roberta Giubilini; The private and public sessions of the Accademia dei Ricovrati: orality, writing, and print in 17th-century Padua, Warren Boutcher; Il passaggiere / the passenger (1612): Benvenuto Italiano’s dialogues for learning spoken Italian, Vilma De Gasperin. Select bibliography; Index.
