Brian Richardson

Questions of language

Unification and the questione della lingua Before the political unification of Italy, Italian was a language used, outside Tuscany and Rome, only by the literate few. Even by these, it was reserved chiefly for writing: in everyday conversation, the great majority of Italians either had to or chose to use one of the dialects of Italy or, in certain areas, a minority language such as French. By the end of the twentieth century, well over 90 per cent of Italians could speak the national language, but most still chose to use dialect or a minority language as well. The process of the diffusion of Italian against a background of continuing linguistic diversity has been a long and difficult one, and it has led to discussions on important cultural and social issues, such as whether the national language should be allowed to develop naturally or should be based on a particular model; how conservative and selective, or tolerant of innovation and variety, it should be; how it was to be disseminated and taught; and, on the other hand, what status should be accorded to languages other than the standard. In some respects, these discussions have continued the questione della lingua which first came to a head in the sixteenth century. In that period a consensus was reached that the literary language of the Italian states should be based on the Tuscan used in the fourteenth century by the indisputably most elegant writers, Petrarch and Boccaccio. This solution was apparently backward-looking, but it proved the most viable and attractive, given the political fragmentation and vulnerability of Italy and the waning cultural prestige of contemporary Tuscany.

A Scribal Publisher of Political Information: Francesco Marcaldi

Abstract Between 1571 and 1597, Francesco Marcaldi transcribed nine short accounts of foreign and Italian states, presenting them to diplomats, clerics, soldiers, and other individuals throughout Italy. Well over a hundred copies, mostly in his own hand, can be identified. Little is known about the man; he moved between many cities, from Turin, Milan, and Venice to as far south as Naples, and he may have been a secretary. This article considers the kind of information that Marcaldi purveyed, much of it derived from Venetian relazioni, and to whom and how he published it, using personalized letters of transmission rather than dedicatory letters associated with all copies of a work. His gifts were intended to please for their form as well as for their content, and bindings of good quality were used for copies destined for those of high rank.

ORAL CULTURE IN EARLY MODERN ITALY: PERFORMANCE, LANGUAGE, RELIGION

These essays constitute the first collective outcome of a project on Oral Culture, Manuscript, and Print in Early Modern Italy supported by the European Research Council, and it is jointly edited by members of the project team: Stefano Dall’Aglio, Luca Degl’Innocenti, Brian Richardson, Massimo Rospocher, and Chiara Sbordoni. 1 The premise of the project, known informally as Italian Voices, is that in early modern Italy the spoken and sung word had uniquely important roles to play alongside the written word in transmitting information, opinions, and texts throughout society, from the palazzo to the piazza, and from the church to the private household. Oral discussion and performance, both formal and informal, were used intensively in the culture of the educated minority, while the verbal culture of those for whom reading was difficult or impossible had to depend mainly or solely on orality. The project aims to investigate and evaluate the roles that were played by oral culture, either in its relationship with handwritten or printed texts or independently of them. It also considers the nature of the languages that were used and prescribed within this culture. This collection centres on three major aspects of oral culture from the late fifteenth to the early seventeenth century: performances before popular and elite audiences involving the singing of verse or the staging of plays; the varieties of language represented in the theatre and spoken in contemporary society; and the uses of the spoken and sung word in the context of religion. All three aspects raise questions about attempts to control orality on the part of states, men of letters, or the Church. In terms of geographical coverage, the essays range from the Venetian republic and the duchy of Ferrara southwards to Florence and Rome. A first group of essays explores performances that were intended as entertainments, given in the street or on the stage. Luca Degl’Innocenti studies the poetic craft of the public performer Cristofano Fiorentino called l’Altissimo. He sheds light both on the compositional techniques of semi-improvisation used in narrative verse and on what he terms the ‘fruitful alliance between orality and typography’. The essay goes on to examine Cristofano’s printed courtly lyric poetry and capitoli, one of which reveals that he was also a sculptor, and it underlines affinities between the Florentine and contemporaries skilled in performance such as Leonardo da Vinci and Pietro Aretino. The importance of the interaction between traditions of oral performance and the printing industry is studied by Rosa Salzberg with reference to the cheap religious texts that itinerant

The Creation and Reception of Fortunio's Regole Grammaticali (1516)

The first printed grammar of the Italian vernacular, Fortunios Regole grammaticali della volgar lingua (1516) responded to a need for guidance in imitating Tuscan authors of the Trecento, in line with the doctrine whose most authoritative proponent was Pietro Bembo. The Regole emerged on the fringes of the cultural mainstream. Fortunio conceived the work in Venice but he came to be suspected of treachery against that state. The structure of the Regole does not follow slavishly that of the Regulae grammaticales used to teach Latin. Fortunio owes much to the work of Bembo, but he does not follow him in every respect. The Regole appeared in a relatively minor centre, Ancona, where shortly afterwards Fortunio died violently. The nature of the Regole, and indeed its very existence, did not meet with universal approval. However, it was reprinted frequently in the Cinquecento and had a formative influence on the early study of Italian grammar.

Optimo humanista et greco

On the death of Aldus Manutius in February 1515, the Venetian diarist Marin Sanudo recorded his evaluation of the man’s achievements, praising him as a teacher and scholar and highlighting the correctness of his Latin and Greek editions and their distinctive prefaces. This article considers the rationale for the esteem shown by Sanudo, and by contemporaries such as Erasmus, for Aldus as an outstanding scholar-printer in the classical languages, examining Sanudo’s suggestions about the means by which Aldus established his business and his reputation in Venice, and the extent to which he made use of collaborations. Sanudo’s assessment has a significant limitation, however, since it omits any mention of printing in Italian. The essay goes on to compare and contrast the production of Aldus’s last year, 1514–1515, which includes vernacular texts as well as editions in Latin and Greek, with that of his early career as a printer in the 1490s, when he concentrated on editions of Greek texts. His vernacular editions had an impact no less important than that of his classical ones in the first half of the sixteenth century, and they made a major contribution to the rise of Italian vernacular scholarship.

THE SOCIAL CONNOTATIONS OF SINGING VERSE IN CINQUECENTO ITALY

Abstract The singing of verse in late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy could be associated with social classes to varying degrees. Private performances among the upper classes centred on lyric verse. In the late Quattrocento the courtly poetry of performers such as Serafino Aquilano found an audience outside the social elite, but in the early Cinquecento Bembo promoted a separation of written lyric verse from poetry that might be associated with popular culture. Musical settings of madrigals remained characteristic of fashionable elite performance throughout the century. However, the Tuscan tradition of improvising lyric verse continued to bring together singers from different classes, and narrative verse performed in the piazza by singers from outside the elite drew audiences from across society, to judge from references within the poems and from eyewitness accounts.

RUSTIC LANGUAGE IN A SIXTEENTH-CENTURY FLORENTINE COMEDY: LA BIAGIA DA DECOMANO

AbstractAt some time in the 1520s Bartolomeo Castelli, a publisher of popular texts in Florence, commissioned the printing of a work called LA BIAGIA DA DECOMANO. The anonymous author must have intended this title to recall the two key texts of the letteratura nenciale of the previous century: above all Luigi Pulcis La Beca da Dicomano, but also the poem to which Pulci was responding, La Nencia da Barberino. As we shall see, both these texts had some influence on La Biagia. Unlike them, however, Castellis publication was not a poem in which a peasant declared his love for a village lass, but a comedy depicting the preparation and celebration of a peasant wedding. The themes of this subtype of rustic literature, known as mogliazzi in Tuscany and mariazi in the Veneto, where they were particularly popular, included negotiations over the dowry which were carried out by a marriage-broker acting on behalf of the groom and the brides father, rivalries between two or even three lovers, the wedding ceremony it...