Research Programme

Oral Culture, Manuscript and Print in Early Modern Italy, 1450-1700

From the palazzo to the piazza, from the church to the private household, the spoken and sung word had uniquely important roles to play in transmitting information, opinions and texts in the society of early modern Italy. Oral discussion and performance, both formal and informal, were used intensively in the culture of the literate minority, while the verbal culture of the uneducated depended mainly or solely on orality. Constant interaction between the oral and the written enriched and shaped both forms of expression. Yet the voices that were so prominent throughout the cultural life of this period have been neglected. This project provides the first integrated study of the practices and the social, intellectual and aesthetic values of oral culture, thus opening up new horizons for the study of early modern Italian culture as a whole.

Methodology

In order to anchor the research programme firmly, its key research question is far-reaching yet clearly focused: how did oral culture relate to written culture, and how far was it independent of writing?

Within that overarching question, the programme is studying in more detail four specific topics concerning the interrelations and interactions of oral and literate culture:

1. Social performance and the written literary tradition

How were literary texts read aloud, recited, improvised and performed in formal or informal contexts? What was the written tradition of performed texts, across the social spectrum, and how did written versions relate to performed texts? These questions will be investigated in (a) court and elite culture, (b) non-elite culture, including performances by professional itinerant performers and streetsellers and by the uneducated.

2. Politics, orality and writing

(a) How was spoken or sung performance used, on its own or in conjunction with manuscript and print, in communicating official proclamations (bandi) and other texts concerned with politics, in various centres? How were works on political topics performed in public and in private, such as those recorded in Venice by Marin Sanudo or those given by the Florentine herald?

(b) How were formal speeches used in civic contexts? How did practices differ between republics and states ruled by a single person? For example, how did political oratory develop in Florence from the republic into the grand-ducal period? What use was made of rhetorical training, of printed guides to eloquence and of actual orations? Celebratory speeches delivered on public occasions and deliberative speeches given in councils were circulated scribally and in print: how did the different versions relate to one another?

3. Religion, orality and writing