Voices and Texts in Early Modern Italian Society

This book studies the uses of orality in Italian society, across all classes, from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, with an emphasis on the interrelationships between oral communication and the written word. The Introduction provides an overview of the topic as a whole and links the chapters together. Part 1 concerns public life in the states of northern, central, and southern Italy. The chapters examine a range of performances that used the spoken word or song: concerted shouts that expressed the feelings of the lower classes and were then recorded in writing; the proclamation of state policy by town criers; songs that gave news of executions; the exercise of power relations in society as recorded in trial records; and diplomatic orations and interactions. Part 2 centres on private entertainments. It considers the practices of the performance of poetry sung in social gatherings and on stage with and without improvisation; the extent to which lyric poets anticipated the singing of their verse and collaborated with composers; performances of comedies given as dinner entertainments for the governing body of republican Florence; and a reading of a prose work in a house in Venice, subsequently made famous through a printed account. Part 3 concerns collective religious practices. Its chapters study sermons in their own right and in relation to written texts, the battle to control spaces for public performance by civic and religious authorities, and singing texts in sacred spaces.

Brian Richardson is Emeritus Professor of Italian Language at the University of Leeds, UK. Stefano Dall'Aglio and Massimo Rospocher are Postdoctoral Fellows in Italian Studies at the University of Leeds, UK.

Contents List of Music Examples Acknowledgements Introduction Stefano Dall'Aglio and Massimo Rospocher PART I PUBLIC LIFE 1 The Early Modern Italian Shout Thomas Cohen 2 Voicing Popular Politics: The Town Crier of Murano in the Sixteenth Century Claire Judde de Larivière 3 Singing Songs of Execution in Early Modern Italy Una McIlvenna 4 Moving Words: Everyday Oralities and Social Dynamics in Roman Trials circa 1600 Elizabeth Cohen 5 The Lost Performance: Giannozzo Manetti and Spoken Oratory in Venice in 1448 Brian Jeffrey Maxson 6 Orality and Writing in Diplomatic Interactions in Fifteenth-Century Italy Isabella Lazzarini PART II PRIVATE AND SOCIAL ENTERTAINMENTS 7 Singing Poetry in compagnia in Sixteenth-Century Italy Philippe Canguilhem 8 Sixteenth-Century Italian Petrarchists and Musical Settings of their Verse Brian Richardson 9 Serafino Aquilano and the Mask of Poeta: A Denunciation in the Eclogue of Tyrinto e Menandro (1490) Francesca Bortoletti 10 'Civic Performance' in Renaissance Florence Paola Ventrone 11 Reading Modern Authors: Aretino as Host and Speroni's Dialogo dell'amore Paolo Procaccioli PART III RELIGION 12 Dantean Devotions: Gabriele Barletta's 'Oral' Commedia in Context Nicolò Maldina 13 Vernacular Sermons on the Psalms Printed in Sixteenth-Century Italy: An Interface between Oral and Written Cultures Élise Boillet 14 The Battle for the Piazza: Creative Antagonism between Itinerant Preachers and Street Singers in Late Medieval and Early Modern Italy Massimo Rospocher 15 Orality and Sacred Music in Early Modern Italy Robert Kendrick Select Bibliography Notes on Contributors Index