Term 1 Week 9: Orality and Cheap Print
This week focuses on the continuing importance of oral forms of communications (speaking, singing, performing, reading out loud etc.) and considers also how these interacted with the cheapest printed items and their dissemination.
Seminar Questions
- What kinds of texts were printed cheaply and how did they circulate in different ways to more expensive books?
- What was the role of street performers in disseminating print?
- To what degree did printed texts reach beyond the fully literate part of the population?
Essential Reading
- Luca Degl'Innocenti and Massimo Rospocher, "Urban Voices: The Hybrid Figure of the Street Singer in Renaissance Italy" in Luca Degl'Innocenti and Massimo Rospocher (eds), Street Singers in Renaissance Europe, special issue of Renaissance Studies 33.1 (2019): 17-41.
- Laura Carnelos, "Cheap Printing and Street Sellers in Early Modern Italy", in David Atkinson and Steve Roud eds, Cheap Print and the People: Popular Literature in the European Perspective (Cambridge, 2019), pp. 324-53.
- Giacomo Franco, Charlatans in Piazza San Marco (1610)
- Giuseppe Maria Mitelli, Seller of Rosaries and Printed Images (mid C17th c.)
Further Reading
- Stefano dell'Aglio et al (eds), Oral Culture in Early Modern Italy: Performance, Language, Religion, special issue of the The Italianist, 34.3 (2014)
- Una McIlvenna, "Singing Songs of Execution in Early Modern Italy", in Voices and Texts in Early Modern Italian Society, eds Stefano Dall'Aglio et al (Routledge, 2016)
- Luca Degl'Innocenti, "The Singing Voice and the Printing Press: Itineraries of the Altissimo's Performed Texts in Renaissance Italy", The Italianist, 34:3 (2014): 318-35.
- Luca Degl'Innocenti et al. (eds), Interactions between Orality and Writing in Early Modern Italian Culture (Routledge, 2016)
- Rosa Salzberg, Ephemeral City: Cheap Print and Urban Culture in Renaissance Venice, Manchester University Press, 2014
- Rosa Salzberg, "The Word on the Street: Street Performers and Devotional Texts in Italian Renaissance Cities", The Italianist, 34:3 (2014): 336-48.
- Rosa Salzberg and Massimo Rospocher, "Street Singers in Italian Renaissance Urban Culture and Communication", Cultural and Social History, 9.1 (2012): 9-26.
- The Cantastorie in Renaissance Italy: Street Singers Between Oral and Literate Cultures, edited by Luca Degl’Innocenti, Massimo Rospocher and Rosa Salzberg, 71:2 (2016).
- Massimo Rospocher et al (eds), Crossing Borders, Crossing Cultures: Popular Print in Europe (1450-1900); (De Gruyter, 2019)
- Andrew Pettegree (ed.), Broadsheets: single-sheet publishing in the first age of print (Brill, 2017)
- Flavia Bruni and Andrew Pettegree, Lost Books: Reconstructing the Print World of Pre-Industrial Europe (Brill, 2016).
- Joad Raymond (ed.), Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland to 1660 (2011). (Volume 1 of the Oxford History of Popular Print Culture), Introduction.
- Roger Chartier and Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink (eds), Colportage et lecture populaire. Imprimes de large circulation en Europe xvie - xixe siècles (Paris, 1996).
Web Resources
- Italian Voices: Oral Culture, Manuscript and Print in Early Modern Italy, 1450-1700
- Printed Plague Broadsides - a short talk from a curator at the Newberry Library
- EDPOP: The European Dimensions of Popular Print - a comparative project based in the Netherlands
- Early Modern Soundscapes - a project on oral culture and sound