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.

ContentsList of Music ExamplesAcknowledgementsIntroductionStefano Dall’Aglio and Massimo RospocherPART I PUBLIC LIFE1 The Early Modern Italian ShoutThomas Cohen2 Voicing Popular Politics: The Town Crier of Murano in the Sixteenth CenturyClaire Judde de Larivière3 Singing Songs of Execution in Early Modern ItalyUna McIlvenna4 Moving Words: Everyday Oralities and Social Dynamics in Roman Trials circa 1600Elizabeth Cohen5 The Lost Performance: Giannozzo Manetti and Spoken Oratory in Venice in 1448Brian Jeffrey Maxson6 Orality and Writing in Diplomatic Interactions in Fifteenth-Century ItalyIsabella LazzariniPART II PRIVATE AND SOCIAL ENTERTAINMENTS7 Singing Poetry in compagnia in Sixteenth-Century ItalyPhilippe Canguilhem8 Sixteenth-Century Italian Petrarchists and Musical Settings of their VerseBrian Richardson9 Serafino Aquilano and the Mask of Poeta: A Denunciation in the Eclogue of Tyrinto e Menandro (1490)Francesca Bortoletti10 ‘Civic Performance’ in Renaissance FlorencePaola Ventrone11 Reading Modern Authors: Aretino as Host and Speroni’s Dialogo dell’amorePaolo ProcaccioliPART III RELIGION12 Dantean Devotions: Gabriele Barletta’s ‘Oral’ Commedia in ContextNicolò Maldina13 Vernacular Sermons on the Psalms Printed in Sixteenth-Century Italy: An Interface between Oral and Written CulturesÉlise Boillet14 The Battle for the Piazza: Creative Antagonism between Itinerant Preachers and Street Singers in Late Medieval and Early Modern ItalyMassimo Rospocher15 Orality and Sacred Music in Early Modern ItalyRobert KendrickSelect BibliographyNotes on Contri

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.