Voices and Texts in Early Modern Italian Society

Stefano Dall'Aglio, Brian Richardson, Massimo Rospocher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317000990
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Historia y crítica de la música

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.

Part I
Public life

1 The early modern Italian shout

Thomas V. Cohen

Late in the fall of 1555, Rocca Sinibalda, in the eastern Sabine mountains (some four mule-train hours from Rieti), rebelled against its baron and played for papal lordship. The ploy came to naught, but three years of intense local politics left exuberant tracks on Rome’s judicial paper. To papal inquests, at two moments, the village proffered its version of that history, a chronicle of hurts endured and rare deeds done, and, what matters here, of memorable shouts that made a signal difference.¹

Now my subject here is not this village but a bigger thing: the political great shout, a protean act known to all who observe pre-modern Italy but seldom anatomized or assayed. I argue five things.² First, that there were many kinds, even genres, of shouts – a repertoire as rich as it was familiar. Shouting was thus a zone of deft bricolage, of alert, responsive collective action, of what Bourdieu calls ‘practice’ – thoroughly encoded but also partway free. Second, that, among speech acts, shouting was unusual, in that it caused a phase-change, whereby individual voices merged to form a single collective voice that took power from that merger. The shout shared thus subsumed the ego (as did song and collective prayer and concerted movement).³ Third, that by virtue of its double nature, at once individual and collective, shouting, when ‘political’, was richly polysemic. Most shouts had mingled meanings and mixed effects, both upon the collectivities engaged and upon their single members, shouting or shouted at. Fourth, that the political shout lent itself readily to metonymy; it easily stood in for things larger than itself. Fifth, that the political shout, whatever the mood, be it grave, joyous, mournful, enraged, alarmed, jubilant, compassionate, amazed, or shocked, was a fecund portent, memorable, and readily recalled. Many a shout thus served as signpost for collective memory and eventual chronicle. Shouts made for history.

To lay out a larger argument, let us circle outwards from small things, reading closely seven shouts of Rocca Sinibalda and meditating on parallels or models elsewhere. The shouts of my villagers rephrased, almost verbatim, countless other shouts that sprouted from a wide, deep-rooted shouting culture. Our rebellious villagers did invent some of their own shouts, but in form and content they hewed to familiar models, often centuries old. We can thus link these seven shouts, diverse in tone, setting, effect, and portent, but still conjoined – by culture, by the men who shouted, and by story, as all these shouts forwarded a single drama, the fraught bid for a new regime.

Before launching, two main terms need nailing down: ‘shout’ and ‘political’. Shout itself is fairly easy. Italians had both noun and verb: grido and gridare. As used, these words had a wide range, the verb especially, as it could attach to all sorts of scolding and obloquy. Meanwhile, this oral, vocal world had a plethora of other terms for racket: rumore, tumulto, chiasso, strepito, clamore, furore, furia di popolo, vociferazione among nouns; strillare, chiamare, urlare, levare voce among verbs.⁴ The terms overlapped and splayed, but shared an easy association with disorderly ruckus. Italian statutes, when they ruled on behalf of peace, could pick and choose among them, as could chroniclers of urban uproar.⁵ Note, however, that grido and gridare belonged solely to the human voice, as did the other verbs, while most of the other nouns here might betoken non-vocal or mixed racket. Rumore, for instance, often meant a fight, a noisy affray where the clash of steel, the crack of small-arms, combatants’ cries, the sometime whinnying and thud of horses, and perhaps the clangour of bells could meld in dire cacophony. But, though fights were full of shouting, not all shouts were combat-filled. Meanwhile, what of ‘political’? A slippery term, where politics were deeply social and social life was drenched with politics; at what point was, for instance, a violent family feud a thing of state? Dealings shaded. But our subject here is affairs of state, city, or village, events worthy of chronicle and collective memory, shouts that shifted power, that mobilized, rallied, cowed, moved, swayed, or bonded collectivities. Our village shouters had their tacit liturgy, so now turn to their noisy tale.

First, then, the rebellion’s trajectory. Rocca Sinibalda had been a Cesarini fief, but, in 1555, the current baron, Giuliano, backed Spain while Paul IV lurched towards France. Giuliano, as Colonna in-law, was arrested at New Year’s 1556 when the Colonna princess, Giovanna d’Aragona, a hostage, escaped Rome. At once, his restive, grudging tenants made a tumultuous bid to slip his grasp by marching on Rome to beseech the pope for a judge to hear their grievances. The gambit worked, the judge arrived, and for seven winter weeks villagers trooped before him to parade real and feigned complaints, grist for a judicial mill that would, they hoped, strip Cesarini of his fief and deliver them to the church.⁶ These depositions, a precocious cahier of village doléances, produced a semi-crafted, semi-crafty village history, reaching back some three decades and recounting in ebullient detail the rebellion’s tensest, starkest moments, full, note here, of clamour. We see seven great shouts, as follows:

The first shout: welcoming the soldiers of the church

Massaro (headman) Giovanni Lorenzo di Collini, in his vivid account of the Rocca’s rising, begins: ‘When there came the new castellan, sent by His Holiness, before he was a good crossbow shot away, all the popolo went out to meet him, and began to shout, “Chiesa! Chiesa! Chiesa!” time and time again’.⁷ Any history has its setting, goals, and strategies. Collini testifies here, as would his three colleagues, one by one, at the inquest’s outset, to help the commissario frame the village’s querela (complaint) to bolster their collective case and further the papal design to seize the fief. So this story is collaborative, and of shared voice; the commissario and his notary prompted, and reformulated, what Collini said. Every detail is gravid: the new castellan, how far the villagers went to meet him, the presence of all the popolo, understood, as in any comune, and in Latin law, as the autonomous civic body, and then, note, the tripling of ‘Chiesa!’, and finally Collini’s insistence: the shout came many times. Now, under the Cesarini, the village had lost both its statutes and its right to convene and, so hobbled, had ceased to be a proper popolo. After the castellan arrived would come fresh elections, to which Collini himself now owed his office, and the long-lost polity would spring back to life. So this shout here was more than a greeting; it was Rocca Sinibalda’s Tennis Court Oath, its refoundation and constitutional rebirth. It was in this shout itself that the popolo, like a figure from some chthonic myth, sprang back to life by walking out the gate and cheering. It is a metonymic moment characteristic of an oral culture that worked less by symbols than by solid signs; an act, or a thing, stands in for something larger: the shout, thereby, is popolo itself.

So was this a welcome? Indeed. But it was more: it was ratification, via acclamation. This shout had deepest kinship with all those shouts, from Clovis amidst his warriors, from a new pope before his people, from ancient bishops before their cities, where the multitude shouted acceptance of the new rule and ruler.

Now what did it sound like? Was this shout random and chaotic, or rhythmic? Almost certainly, this was a cadenced shout; the popolo shouted as popolo, ‘time and time again’ (‘più e più volte’), so this shout had its ‘times’. Surely, many political shouts were cadenced chants. The famous palle palle of Medici partisans must have thundered rhythmically, as had many a mora or evviva and aggressive serra serra, or, for that matter, as had an alli giudei.⁸ Chroniclers never tell us, but both social psychology and physics argue for unison and rhythm, with or without a leader. Over lunch I asked my dean of engineering, a specialist in fluid dynamics, whether pulsation was laminar or turbulent; smooth laminar flow is more forceful. He told me how, when, say, syrup gulps from a bottle, that pulsation is laminar. When I gave this paper at Leeds, I asked the scholars to shout thanks to our editor; I led, they chanted. When I stopped, they kept right on without me. Flow, pulsation, momentum and power; unity and instant communion! My wager: political shouts very often morphed into chants. As systems-theorists say, they were self-organizing.⁹

The second shout: bringing back the exiles

A few days later, with the new castellan’s approval, the massari led ‘the whole popolo outside the town’ ‘to a sacred image’ where they met the village exiles. L’immagine, a local landmark, must have marked the boundary between the outer territorio where some exiles might roam and farm and the central terra, from which they were strictly banished. Speaking, note, as popolo, the men of Rocca Sinibalda embraced the three, invited their return, and led them back inside the walls: ‘Let’s go! Let’s go! The popolo will put you back’.¹⁰

The tale told here is by one of the three outlaws, a year later when a hostile judge grills the rebels. Like the greeting of the new castellan, this shout too is a political act; the revived polity overturns Cesarini’s verdict, reinstating men he banished, by marching, all together, to the ban’s severe boundary and fetching the three men in. The exiles had surely been forewarned; nothing here went unplanned. As for the shout, less thunderous, less rhythmic than chiesa chiesa but clearly collective, it at once welcomed the men, and, in effect, acclaimed, and also ratified, a decision made discreetly in committee. When a popolo acts, it best expresses its will with a shout. The event brings to mind the extraordinary shouts that, we shall see, so impressed the crusader Villehardouin when massed Venetians at San Marco ratified their contract with the Fourth Crusade. Then, as here at Rocca Sinibalda, the spontaneity was largely planned and deeply calculated, but no less felt for that. The village shout at its exiles-boundary served a triple purpose: to ease the exiles’ actual entry, to ratify the daring plot to bring them home, and to reaffirm the power and vitality of the reborn popolo the outcry invoked and named.

The third shout, in general council

Not long after that shout, in renewed statutory fashion the reanimated popolo chose its four new massari, no longer Cesarini appointees, and revived its long-vacant Council of Twelve. There followed heated committee meetings and two general councils of the whole village, at the second of which all present swore a solemn, dire oath – death to all dissenters – to uphold the new regime. The next day, the massari opted to send a delegation of 10 or 12 men to Rome, to beg the pope himself for a judge and inquest, and dispatched a messenger with a letter of inquiry. The next day, this tidy plan broke down; a third general council gathered at the house of the roughneck Nuntio, one of the three ex-exiles. The most respected massaro was prosperous Caponero; he had backed the planned delegation, but then another massaro persuaded him that, for unanimity’s sake, each household should send its head to Rome. A truly dreadful idea! At the meeting, Caponero rose to speak. He began by telling the other massari to say what they desired. And the other massari, one after the other, said, ‘You say it! You say it!’ (‘Di’ tu!’).

Caponero began by saying, ‘I will speak, but I don’t want it to go the way it went the other times, when you made me speak and then did things the way you wanted to.’ And because they answered him that he should not worry and should say what it was he desired, he said, ‘I want you to swear on this mass book not to contradict what I will tell you.’¹¹

Note this doubling: does the witness repeat the di’ tu to indicate many voices, or repetition, or does he merely evoke the call’s force? Were the massari shouting across the crowded room? Hard to say, but clearly, when Caponero then told everyone to swear an oath to march on Rome, deliberation foundered. Easy it would have been to vote to let zealots go kiss the papal slipper, but ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of music examples
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I Public life
• PART II Private and social entertainments
• PART III Religion
• Select bibliography
• Notes on contributors
• Index