Heresy, Culture, and Religion in Early Modern Italy: Contexts and Contestations. Edited by Ronald K. Delph Michelle M. Fontaine and John Jeffries Martin. Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies 76. Kirksville, Mo.: Truman State University Press, 2006. xiv + 266 pp. $49.95 cloth.

AbstractThis paper aims to assess whether the emerging research paradigm of the new speaker may be useful in the study of language history. This question is tackled by exploring the dynamics which arose between Florentines and non-Florentine learners in sixteenth-century Italy. At the time, notwithstanding the peninsula’s linguistic fragmentation, the written language came to be progressively standardised around an archaic variety of Florentine (the fourteenth-century vernacular used by Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio). Florentines, initially, had no active role in this process and literary Florentine was living an autonomous life, becoming, at the written level, a “learner” variety progressively influenced by its new users. If at first Florentines themselves saw the emerging exogenous written standard in negative terms, they were not immune to its influence – an influence which grew stronger as the century progressed. The dynamics which arose between Florentines and learners concerning linguistic ownership appear similar to the ones which exist between “traditional” linguistic minorities and new speakers in some present-day revitalisation contexts. It is argued that the “new speaker” lens, mainly employed in the field of endangered languages, is valuable for capturing the dynamics which emerge between different groups during historical processes of language standardisation.

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Food Culture and Literary Imagination in Early Modern Italy

10.5117/9789463728034 ◽

2022 ◽

Author(s):

Laura Giannetti

Keyword(s):

Sixteenth Century ◽

Early Modern ◽

Social Order ◽

Medical Discourse ◽

Literary Imagination ◽

Food Culture ◽

Early Modern Italy ◽

Wide Range ◽

Prescriptive Literature ◽

And Gender

As the long sixteenth century came to a close, new positive ideas of gusto/taste opened a rich counter vision of food and taste where material practice, sensory perceptions and imagination contended with traditional social values, morality, and dietetic/medical discourse. Exploring the complex and evocative ways the early modern Italian culture of food was imagined in the literature of the time, Food Culture and the Literary Imagination in Early Modern Italy reveals that while a moral and disciplinary vision tried to control the discourse on food and eating in medical and dietetic treatises of the sixteenth century and prescriptive literature, a wide range of literary works contributed to a revolution in eating and taste. In the process long held visions of food and eating, as related to social order and hierarchy, medicine, sexuality and gender, religion and morality, pleasure and the senses, were questioned, tested and overturned, and eating and its pleasures would never be the same.

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Domestic space and identity: artisans, shopkeepers and traders in sixteenth-century Siena

Urban History ◽

10.1017/s0963926810000519 ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 37 (3) ◽

pp. 372-385 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

PAULA HOHTI

Keyword(s):

Sixteenth Century ◽

Early Modern ◽

Urban Space ◽

Social Relations ◽

Social Activity ◽

Domestic Space ◽

Collective Identities ◽

Public And Private ◽

Early Modern Italy ◽

The City

ABSTRACT:Historians of early modern Italy have traditionally viewed the city's public spaces, such as streets, quarters, taverns and marketplaces, as the chief locations in which claims to identity were launched into the broader urban community. Recent studies on the domestic interior, however, have shown that the distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’ in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century urban space was much more complex. In this period, private urban houses became sites for an increasing range of social acitvities that varied from informal evening gatherings to large wedding banquets. Focusing on this ‘public’ dimension of the private urban house, this article explores how the middling classes of artisans and shopkeepers used the domestic space to construct identities and to facilitate social relations in sixteenth-century Siena. The aim is to show that in providing a setting for differing forms of economic and social activity, the urban home together with its objects and furnishings may have provided an increasingly important physical location for craftsmen, shop-owners and traders to negotaite individual and collective identities within the broader communities of the city.

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Fighting Eve: Women on the Stage in Early Modern Italy

Quaderni d'italianistica ◽

10.33137/q.i..v37i2.29227 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 37 (2) ◽

pp. 23-48

Author(s):

Nicla Riverso

Keyword(s):

Sixteenth Century ◽

Early Modern ◽

Catholic Church ◽

Freedom Of Expression ◽

Western Culture ◽

Commedia Dell'arte ◽

Early Modern Italy ◽

Women's Role ◽

The Catholic Church

The Catholic revival in the sixteenth century coincides with the opening of the commedia dell’arte stage to women, leading to progress for female performers. However, the presence of women in the commedia dell’arte immediately shows contradictions and disagreements with the teaching of the Catholic Church. At this time, women were depicted as an emblem of Catholic morality: they were supposed to be devoted mothers and wives and their life was confined within the domestic household. In my paper, I analyze how difficult it was for women to prevail against religious and cultural prejudices and gain respect and recognition as actresses. My aim is to point out how the presence of women on the stage brought about a revolution for women’s role in Western culture offering a freedom of expression against traditional moral patterns and giving female performers a chance to demonstrate cleverness and professionalism.

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AUTHORITY AND POWER IN EARLY MODERN ITALY: RECENT ITALIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY Fonti ecclesiastiche per la storia sociale e religiosa d'Europa: XV–XVIII secolo. Edited by Cecilia Nubola and Angelo Turchini. Bologna: Società editrice il Mulino, Annali dell'Istituto storico italo-germanico in Trento, 50, 1999. Pp. 563. ISBN 88-15-07070-2. Benandanti e inquisitori nel Friuli del Seicento. By Franco Nardon. Foreword by Andrea Del Col. Trieste: Editioni Università di Trieste, 1999. Pp. 254. ISBN 88-8303-022-2. Tempi e spazi di vita femminile tra medioevo ed età moderna. Edited by Silvana Seidel Menchi, Anne Jacobson Schutte, and Thomans Kuehn. Bologna: Società editrice il Mulino, Annali dell'Istituto storico italo-germanico in Trento, 51, 1999. Pp. 577. ISBN 88-15-07234-9. Partial translation: Time, space, and women's lives in early modern Europe. Kirksville, MS: Truman State University Press, Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies, no. 57, 2001. Pp. 336. ISBN 0-943549-82-5 (hb). ISBN 0-943549-90-6 (pb). Church, censorship and culture in early modern Italy. Edited by Gigliola Fragnito. Translated by Adrian Belton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. 264. ISBN 0-521-66172-2. Court and politics in papal Rome, 1492–1700. Edited by Gianvittorio Signorotto and Maria Antonietta Visceglia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. 257. ISBN 0-521-64146-2.

The Historical Journal ◽

10.1017/s0018246x04233817 ◽

2004 ◽

Vol 47 (2) ◽

pp. 501-510

Author(s):

MOSHE SLUHOVSKY

Keyword(s):

Early Modern ◽

Historical Analysis ◽

Early Modern Period ◽

State University ◽

Early Modern Europe ◽

Cambridge University ◽

Early Modern Italy ◽

Time Space ◽

Women's Lives ◽

Innovative Work

The five books under review represent some of the recent achievements of Italian historiography of the early modern period. The gradual opening of Inquisitional archives in the 1990s and the growing sophistication of historical analysis of Inquisitorial documents have expanded dramatically our knowledge of and familiarity with the institutional and legal histories of the Inquisition and of the operation of justice in the Italian peninsula. One result of this is that the earlier and innovative work of Carlo Ginzburg in Inquisitorial archives has come under scrutiny. The books under review present a new view of the functioning of the Italian Inquisition, and by so doing shed new light on issues of authority and power in early modern Italy. Implicitly, the books under review also posit themselves against microstoria and address the larger working of power over long periods of time.

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Prophets, Saints, and Matriarchs: Portraits of Old Women in Early Modern Italy*

Renaissance Quarterly ◽

10.1086/656929 ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 63 (3) ◽

pp. 807-849 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Erin J. Campbell

Keyword(s):

Sixteenth Century ◽

Early Modern ◽

Social Reform ◽

Pivotal Role ◽

Symbolic Order ◽

Early Modern Italy ◽

The Family ◽

Women's Lives

AbstractThis essay examines portraits of old women that were produced for the households of the professional and elite classes in Emilia-Romagna, Lombardy, and the Veneto during the second half of the sixteenth century, when, as a result of religious and social reform, women's lives came under increasing scrutiny. By interpreting the portraits within the context of prescriptive texts on the stages of women's lives, this study argues that the portraits provide evidence for the pivotal role of old women within the moral and symbolic order of the family, as well as in the wider community beyond the home.

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