Journal of Early Modern Studies, n. 7 (2018), pp. 7-22
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.13128/JEMS-2279-7149-22835

ISSN 2279-7149 (online)
www.fupress.com/bsfm-jems
2018 Firenze University Press

Editorial

The present issue of JEMS (Out Loud: Practices of Reading and Reciting in 
Early Modern Times) intends to map an insidious territory. The debate about 
orality is not only old, but illustrious, since it has been revolving, for a couple 
of centuries, around two fundamental texts of the Western canon, i.e. the 
Homeric poems, Iliad and Odyssey. And yet, this subject, while inevitably 
involving the field of ‘orality’, concentrates on a more specific instance of that 
domain, and, in line with the chronological span of this journal, on a specific 
time span known as ‘early modern’. This means that the ‘orality’ dealt with in 
this volume cannot be separated from the phenomenon which characterizes 
the beginning of the early modern era, i.e. the invention of printing – certainly, 
a non-Homeric phenomenon. That is why this is an insidious territory. The 
‘literature read aloud’ dealt with in the present volume is assailed from every 
corner by concurrent and competing traditions and procedures of the fruition 
of literary texts: silent reading of books, which the printing industry made 
readily available; the subsequent, general increase of literacy, especially in 
Protestant countries; the explosion (or re-explosion) of the theatre as a secular, 
open form of entertainment. And yet, all these phenomena, which might 
seem to discourage and make sadly obsolete the custom of reading aloud, in 
the end reveal themselves to be peculiar, but effective bed-fellows of this very 
custom. The main, collective and final result of the essays in the present volume 
is precisely the demonstration of the interferences, reciprocal influences, and 
productive reactions that took place between the persistent, resilient habit of 
‘reading aloud’ and the other means of getting acquainted with a verbal text.

The Introduction by Cesare Molinari, in this sense, frames this issue by 
addressing head-on the challenging nature of the subject. An experienced 
scholar in the field of theatre studies, Molinari is quite aware especially of the 
porous borders between the actual performance of a text – on a designated 
stage, in a theatre of some sort, by professional actors, with the aid of all the 
customary paraphernalia of a show – and the very different nature of simple 
‘reciting’, or reading aloud, a text. This is why his contribution does not avoid 
the confrontation between these two procedures of oral fruition of a text, where 
the addressee, in both cases, is a listener and not a reader. Molinari emphasises 
first of all the discredit that written texts – and its custodians – seem to nourish 
against any form of taking over by the human voice, be it the voice of a simple 
reader, or of a professional actor. This is why Lycurgus (fourth century BCE) 

had a measure approved providing for the setting up of bronze statues of the three 
great fifth-century tragedians – Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides – in the Theatre 
of Dionysus (which had recently been rebuilt in stone). At the same time he also 



riccardo bruscagli8 

ordered that the authentic texts of their works be placed in the city archives so as to 
prevent actors from introducing additions or variations. (25)

This is why the Shakespearean first folio and subsequent editions were so 
anxious to protect the true words of the Bard from the ‘iniurious impostors’ 
who ‘maimed’ and ‘deformed’ them. But even such an exclusionary relationship 
between written, and oral texts, even in the perilous domain of theatrical works, 
can give way to a sort of alliance. Molinari cites the well known case of the 
reading aloud (not performance!) of Alfieri’s tragedies in Florence, in private, 
by the author himself: the reduction of a potential public performance to a 
one-man reading aloud, something intended as a preliminary test for sure, but 
also perfectly autonomous per se, and charged with demanding expectations 
by the author/reciter. On the other hand, Molinari demonstrates how fragile 
and ever changing this relationship of rivalry/alliance between theatrical texts 
performed/read aloud can be. A situation similar to the one staged by Alfieri in 
his Florentine home – the recitation of Marion Delorme by Victor Hugo, at ‘a 
meeting of the cream of Parisian intelligentsia’ – turned into an instantaneous, 
unintentional rehearsal of the play, when one of the listeners, Baron Taylor, at 
that time the manager of the Théâtre Français, ‘forced Hugo to sell him the play 
forthwith’ (27). In Molinari’s view, a text read aloud is, in other words, always 
on the threshold of the stage: but what is interesting is exactly the distance, 
small as it may be, that separates the two: it is the border, as thin as can be, 
which is of the utmost interest here. Another border explored by Molinari is 
the one between the book and recitation. Where the book – and here Molinari 
delights in pushing the challenge to the extreme – is not simply an ordinary 
literary text but, again, a ‘book’ for the theatre, a script. In this case, Molinari 
deals with the relationship between memory and the reciting voice, considering 
the case of a written text which lies behind the voice, but has been hidden 
and ‘forgotten’ when the voice speaks aloud. And, again, the most interesting 
cases are those when the border is more fragile. Molinari addresses here the 
questions of the improvisation in the Italian Commedia dell’Arte, reaffirming 
the opinion that this phenomenon actually existed (against some illustrious 
negationists), but emphasizes the importance of the written texts consulted and 
memorized by the improvising actors in order to accumulate the verbal means 
which allowed them the acrobatic quality of their technique: here we have, once 
again, a case of an alliance between the book and the voice. Certain specific 
occurrences of an alliance of this type seem even more enticing: the case when 
‘the story-teller recites, book in hand (the Kings of France), which did not stop 
him gesticulating and moving about on the small platform: he looked at the 
book when he needed to, as though it were a prompt’ (28); the case of ‘May 
celebrations along the North Tuscan coast’, where, according to some scholars, 
‘the presence of a prompt or scroll’ is included, but ‘the audience could not see 
them’; whereas, in the personal experience of Molinari himself, such a presence 
sometimes is visible: he recalls 



editorial 9 

a Maggio (traditional May celebration-performance) held near a village in the 
Apennine mountains. It was thus a specifically theatrical occasion. There was a single 
performer (an actor or storyteller, whatever you want to call him) who recited a story 
mostly consisting of words of characters from the story of Renaud de Montauban (aka 
Rinaldo), moving around the meadow in front of no more than twenty spectators, but 
accompanied by a prompter who whispered in his ear, reading the words the reciter 
had to turn into a chant, naturally accompanying them with limited though intense 
gestures. It should be recalled that Maestro Cosimo mentioned by Pitrè had used a 
book as a prompt, but only for occasional use, for any moments of uncertainty. Here, 
though, prompting was permanent, the utterances being brief, their length being 
increased by a drawn out, monotonous chant, albeit subject to a strong rhythm, as 
if the storyteller wanted to confer on the words that he alone could hear a kind of 
religious tone rather than the coherence of a story. (29-30)

These might constitute some exceptional aspects of the rivalry/alliance 
between the written text and the voice: more common, at the beginning of the 
early modern era, was certainly the contemporary presence of the performer 
and his text in the squares and streets where the cantari were sung, or recited, 
with the aid of the ubiquitous ‘viola’: a phenomenon well illustrated in the 
essay by Luca Degl’Innocenti. But Molinari also quotes as customary the 
fact that the canterino, after singing his cantare, would sell the text of his 
performance to the audience, so that his verses, after being listened to, could 
be read calmly in silence (or maybe repeated aloud?).

The voice and the recitation of a literary text naturally imply the presence of 
a body. Here, once again, the domain of reading aloud borders dangerously on 
the domain of theatre. But in fact there are so many differences, and nuances, 
between the ability of a reader and the profession of an actor. Molinari is quick 
to remind us, in fact, that a substantial section of the Institutio oratoria by 
Quintilian deals with action, i.e. non-verbal communication or body language, 
of the orator: something – and someone – that is not (yet?) a true acting skill, 
or a fully professional actor. In this sense, the strange misreading of Livy by 
Nicholas Trevet, about the ancient actor Titus Andronicus, and the way the 
Latin comedies were performed, makes a further contribution to this subject: 
i.e., the possible splitting of the actor’s professional skills among different mimes 
or speakers. As Molinari recalls, Trevet wrote: 

You should know that tragedies and comedies were acted as follows: the theatre 
was semi-circular, at the centre of which there was a booth called scena containing 
a pulpit from which the poet recited his lines; the mimes were outside, acting the 
words with gestures, associating them with the character concerned. (31n.)

This is a curious misunderstanding indeed: but it takes us back to a time 
where the different skills that we instinctively associate today with ‘acting’ 
could be considered separate, and linked to different typologies and levels of 
fruition of an ‘oral’ text. 



riccardo bruscagli10 

Concerning the voice being separated from the body, and pronunciation 
from non-verbal communication, Molinari quotes the case of ‘Cimador, the son 
of the actor/clown Zuan Polo Liompardi’, who ‘imitated a whole troop of voices’ 
(according to Pietro Aretino) ‘from behind a door – or perhaps a curtain. Thus 
the “show” consisted of a voice, though one can imagine that the spectators 
gazed at that curtain, as though they were awaiting the appearance of those 
characters who sounded like a large group but were only a single individual’ 
(34). Which brings us, with a quite a vertiginous leap, to modern times, or 
rather, the possibility of a progressive disappearance of the body from the action 
of reading aloud. The curtain behind which Cimador used to hide can become 
the device which ‘reads’ to us, aloud, a text: pure voice, be it coming from the 
radio, an audiobook, or even a visual medium, where, however, the physical 
presence of the reciting person is no longer required. Reading aloud has become 
quite popular again: probably it has been the influence of modern media which 
has triggered the contemporary practice of public reading of classics, Dante 
in primis (at least in Italy). This opens a further question: is the ever-changing 
relationship between an ‘oral’ and a ‘written’ text also a reflection of a different, 
and yet parallel relationship, between illiterate people (the ones who could, and 
can, only ‘listen’) and literate people (the ones who could, and can, listen and 
read)? It is a loaded, and even disturbing question, which resurfaces more than 
once in the essays of the volume.

The essay by Luca Degl’Innocenti – ‘Singing and Printing Chivalric Poems 
in Early Modern Italy’ – while concentrating on a specific literary genre, on a 
specific literature and language, and on a specific span of time (essentially the late 
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries) deals with a question which is fundamental for 
the general subject developed in this volume. In other words, this contribution is 
presented as a case study, but its implications are also methodologically significant. 
Degl’Innocenti is well aware that he is dealing with a tradition 

that had been intimately linked to orality since the dawn of time, so much so that 
research on oral poetry itself, as is well known, was born and has grown in close 
contact with that on epic traditions, both dead and alive, be it the Homeric poems, 
Beowulf, and the chansons de geste, or the poetry of modern-time Serbian guslar, West 
African griot, and Turkish âşik. (43)

And he is well aware that the prevalent position, within this field of study, 
has been, and is, quite sceptical about the actual possibility of orality: i.e., the 
possibility that epic Western poems could be created and performed without 
the aid of writing. From the very beginning of his article, Degl’Innocenti 
states his position quite clearly, which is exactly the opposite: 

This text-centred approach may be right in many cases, but it might turn out to be 
rather overcautious and ultimately counterproductive in others, especially when a 
substantial body of textual and contextual evidence proves that orality (and vocality, 



editorial 11 

and aurality) played a very active role in the composition and circulation of a certain 
genre. In my experience, Italian chivalric poetry is a perfect case in point. In theory, 
literary scholars know well that during the first centuries of Italian literature the oral 
and the written dimensions were mutually, continuously, and deeply permeable; in 
practice, nevertheless, such awareness fades away into an inert historical background 
when examining specific texts and genres, which are interpreted only in terms of 
written texts and of interactions between them. (44-45)

The author, on the other hand, pleads vigorously for the vital, continuous 
presence of orality in the Italian tradition of chivalric cantari (a word which, 
after all, means nothing else, but ‘singing’), arguing for a fundamental 
principle: the distinction between ‘oral composition’ and ‘oral recitation’. 
Having demonstrated elsewhere that even Machiavelli was an improviser, 
Degl’Innocenti doesn’t shy away from affirming that ‘oral composition’ never 
died, and was very well alive even during the Renaissance; but, in particular, 
his point is ‘that a decline of oral composition does not imply a decline of oral 
recitation’ (45). In other words, even when poems were no longer composed 
during performance, and therefore they were not strictly speaking ‘oral poems’, 
they could still be mainly composed in order to be performed, at least through 
reading aloud, and in this sense their orality was real. This principle guides 
Degl’Innocenti in his investigation about the relationship between printing 
and reciting chivalric texts: once again, the ‘book’ and the ‘voice’ are here 
under scrutiny, not only as irreconcilable enemies, but also as allies – and not 
just occasional ones. The essay makes three main points: 1. ‘Chivalric poetry 
was still commonly and primarily performed in public both in the fifteenth 
and sixteenth centuries’. 2. ‘Oral poetry and printed books were not at all on 
opposite fronts in the first decades of the Gutenberg era; on the contrary, they 
were very close allies’. 3. ‘Even from a textual point of view, the relationship 
between performed poems and printed ones could be much closer and more 
direct than we are used to thinking’ (47). The force of such arguments relies 
first of all on the anecdotal evidence of the widespread practice of singing 
aloud. Degl’Innocenti quotes two very humorous and well known Facetiae by 
Poggio Bracciolini which should be able to convince anyone of the popularity 
of the canterini in fourteenth-century Italy: the first one, ‘of the man who gets 
home from the piazza in speechless despair and barely finds the courage to 
confess to his worried wife the daunting news he just heard from a ‘cantor’, 
that the paladin Roland is dead’; and that of ‘the man who ruins himself 
by paying day by day a special reward to a street entertainer who sings the 
deeds of Hector, if only he postpones the instalment in which the Trojan hero 
must die’ (47). But, beyond such colourful accounts, which demonstrate the 
ongoing success of chivalric public recitations in Renaissance Italy, it is mainly 
in the painstaking reconstruction and reconsideration of certain obscure, but 
indeed illuminating figures active in the field of chivalric literature between 
the end of the fourteenth and the first decades of the fifteenth centuries, 



riccardo bruscagli12 

which sheds a clear light over the cultural panorama we are observing here. 
The lives and activities of individuals like Antonio da Guido, Jacopo Coppa, 
and especially – the most controversial, but the most fascinating of them all 
– ‘Zoppino’, eloquently demonstrate that a powerful synergy between the 
printing industry and vocality was at work from the very beginning of the 
Gutenberg era: 

In late fifteenth-century Florence the art of printing itself was first imported by the most 
famous street singer of his age, Antonio di Guido …, and the account books of printing 
shops such as the Ripoli press (based in a convent near Santa Maria Novella) were soon 
dotted with names of charlatans and street singers (ciurmadori and cantimpanca) who 
repeatedly bought dozens of copies of popular books, including many short chivalric 
romances, for the evident purpose of selling them during their performances. (48)

Degl’Innocenti demonstrates beyond any doubt that 

By the early sixteenth century, it was far from unusual for cantimpanca also to do 
business as regular publishers and booksellers: such is the case, for instance, of the 
Florentine Zanobi della Barba, who published no less than 30 titles in the 1500s 
and 1510s …, and of numerous peers of his in central and northern Italy, like Paolo 
Danza, Ippolito Ferrarese, Francesco Faentino, Jacopo Coppa called ‘Il Modenese’, 
and Paride Mantovano called ‘Il Fortunato’. (48-49)

But, as already observed, the most intriguing case is that of Zoppino: well 
documented as a publisher, but only recently revealed by Massimo Rospocher 
in his identity as a cantimpanca. The symbiosis between the profession of 
printer and that of public reciter could not be better exemplified – with 
telling consequences on the evaluation of well-known techniques of the 
narrative chivalric code. For example, the continuous interruption of the 
narrative, that is, the fundamental axiom of entrelacement, in the poems 
of Boiardo and Ariosto, appears not to be just a typical device of simulated 
orality, but the reflection of an actual performative mode of the cantimbanchi. 
Degl’Innocenti quotes a malicious passage in Piero Aretino’s Dialogues of 
Nanna and Pippa, where Zoppino is cited as a paradigm of the charlatans’ 
mastery in enthralling the audience and playing with the dynamics of pleasure 
postponement. But, what is even more curious, Nanna quotes Zoppino’s 
ability as an example for the technique of sexual pleasure postponement that 
Pippa, if she wants to be a good courtesan, must learn: 

You know that Zoppino sang the tale up to the midway point; and when he had 
gathered a mob about him, he would turn his cape inside out and before getting 
set to finish the tale, he wanted to peddle a thousand other trifles … Well, saying ‘I 
don’t want to’ and ‘I can’t’ just at the sweet climax, are in fact like the recipes that 
Zoppino gets down to sell, when he leaves the delighted crowd high and dry by 
cutting short his story of Campriano. (51n.) 



editorial 13 

Which is no less than funny, since the technique of entrelacement has been 
in turn compared to sexual pleasure postponement in Daniel Javitch’s well-
known essay entitled ‘Cantus interruptus’. The last point touched upon 
by Degl’Innocenti in his article is a final re-evaluation of the problem of 
texts vocally performed – for sure – but also orally composed. The solution 
proposed here is, let us say, moderate. Degl’Innocenti does not dismiss 
the idea that a cantimpanca could actually compose his script during the 
performance, but ‘not ex nihilo’: that is, taking advantage of a baggage of 
topoi, and tropoi, amassed in his memory, from the reading of written and 
printed texts (something very similar, in other words, to the improvisational 
technique of the Commedia dell’Arte, as interpreted by Molinari in the previous 
essay). Conversely, Degl’Innocenti’s article agrees with the old proposal of 
Domenico de Robertis, who imagined cantari composed ‘a tavolino’: some 
sort of ‘performance at the desk’, ‘a sort of in vitro reproduction, quill in 
hand in facing a blank page, of an actual oral performance, bow in hand in 
front of an audience’ (55-56). Finally, the ultimate word is that we should 
never consider the ‘book’ as a drastic alternative to ‘performance’, and silent 
reading as the enemy of reading aloud. The very special case of Cristoforo 
l’Altissimo teaches us that what is interesting is to investigate the numerous 
and sometimes surprising ways in which these two phenomena interact. A 
whole cycle of recitations by Altissimo (from the Reali di Francia by Andrea 
da Barberino), in fact, had the very special destiny of being reported in 
writing (in real time) and then printed, many years after they were actually 
performed, without revision by the author: they keep all the marks of orality 
that we can expect from this kind of transcription. On the other hand, when 
Altissimo himself printed his Rotta di Ravenna, he accurately erased the most 
obvious oral traits of his text, trying to transform it into a ‘legitimate’ literary 
work. Once again, improvisation, memory, transcription, print, play together 
a game much more complex than the supporters of orality vs the book – or 
vice-versa – could ever imagine. 

The essay by this writer, ‘Voices from the New World: Giuliano Dati’s La 
storia della inventione delle nuove insule di Channaria indiane’ is an apt case-
study within the larger frame built up by by Degl’Innocenti’s article. It deals 
with two documents, two poetic texts in octaves, both related to the discovery 
of the New World: a cantare by the Florentine Giuliano Dati, which recasts 
the Letter of Christopher Columbus to Luis de Santángel (or/and to Raphael 
Sanchez), and a chapter of the Libro dell’Universo (‘Book of the Universe’) by 
Matteo Fortini, another Florentine, which re-writes the Letter of Vespucci 
to Soderini announcing the discovery of a ‘mondo nuovo’. And yet, these 
two literary productions, so symmetrical in that they both take advantage of 
the first ‘news’ related to so great an event, share little besides their metrical 
structure. In fact, they neatly show the pliable nature of the ‘octave’ at the end 
of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries: Dati’s work is 
an independent text, truly intended to be ‘sung’; Fortini’s work, on the other 



riccardo bruscagli14 

hand, is just an expansion within a long, complex, rhymed treatise; Dati’s 
cantare enjoyed quite remarkable success as a published text (there were three 
editions – that we are aware of – in the year 1493 alone: one in Rome, by E. 
Silber, on 15th June; a second in Florence, by ‘Johannes dictus florentinus’, 
on 25th October, and a third one in Florence again, publisher unknown, on 
26th October); Fortini’s report, on the other hand, was buried within the 
pages of the manuscript of the Libro dell’Universo, and only in recent times 
has been printed and made accessible to a larger audience. In this sense, the 
opposition between the two ‘poetic’ translations of Columbus’ and Vespucci’s 
announcements could not be starker. Dati constantly addresses an audience of 
listeners (auditore is a word disseminated all through the text, and at the end 
of his cantare the author explicitly mentions a crowd of ‘Magnific’e discreti 
circhunstanti’ – ‘Magnificent and kind people, gathered around’; 72n.); 
Fortini, on the contrary, continually conjures up an audience of ‘readers’. But, 
once again: given this basic distinction, and established without any doubt 
the nature of Dati’s text as a ‘script’ to be recited, we are not authorized to 
conclude that Giuliano Dati was in fact a canterino. His Storia della invention 
delle nuove insule di Channaria indiane is actually a perfect example of what 
Luca Degl’Innocenti, echoing a suggestion of Domenico De Robertis, has 
dubbed ‘performance at the desk’. Giuliano Dati was a prelate, a dignified 
member of the court of Pope Alexander VI, and the author of a substantial 
body of cantari (Historia e leggenda di San Biagio, 1492-1493, Historia di Sancta 
Maria de Loreto, 1492-1493, Stazioni e indulgenze di Roma, 1492-1493, La 
Magna Lega and Il Diluvio di Roma, both printed in 1495-1496, Leggenda di 
S. Barbara, 1494, Storia di S. Job profeta, 1495), all of them printed – in fact, 
the author seems to have accurately cultivated the publication of his works, 
taking prompt advantage of the newly available technology. Not a ‘singer’ 
himself (at least, as far as we know), that does not imply, though, that Dati 
did not intend his cantari to be sung, but simply read. On the contrary, we 
are witnessing here a typical case of a body of texts composed scrupulously 
following the format of oral texts, but not – this is the argument of the essay 
– as a pure fictive literary device, but as a real compliance to the demands of 
an actual oral purpose of these texts. On this assumption, the essay proceeds 
in detecting the oral marks of Dati’s cantare, in a close, constant comparison 
with its Latin source – since Dati did not follow the original text by Columbus, 
but its Latin translation by the humanist Leandro de Cosco (even though 
there is some evidence of Dati’s possible knowledge of the Spanish text). 
Among these features, the most characteristic are the oscillation between the 
management of the narrative by the canterino himself, and his surrender to 
the voice of Columbus (with a consequent, curious passage from the plural 
‘voi’, when it is the singer who addresses his crowd, to the singular ‘tu’, when 
it is Columbus who addresses his king, the official addressee of the original 
letter); the clumsy repetition of information, especially at the beginning of 
the cantare’; and Dati’s dissection, and re-assembling, of the ‘narrative cells’ 



editorial 15 

of the original narrative in a different order (a phenomenon that has already 
been noticed, but that is painstakingly reconstructed in this essay in its 
systematic procedure). Can we detect a real ‘strategy’ in all this? Something 
resembling a ‘poetics’? Up to a certain point. The final conclusion of the essay 
limits itself to an idea of a poetics of ‘confusion’: 

… the dismembering and reassembling of the original text does not seem to follow 
an alternative compositional plan. Instead, the impression one gets is that Giuliano 
Dati scribbled down the most interesting bits of information he could glean from his 
source and then assembled them in his cantare without any scruples about fidelity 
to the structural order of the text he was transforming. The new disorder, shall we 
say, of the text was apparently of no importance to Giuliano Dati. He knew that 
what was important was to communicate in the most interesting, vibrant, exciting 
manner a bundle of information, information that his listeners would have neither 
the time nor attention to scrutinize for inconsistencies. (93-94) 

After all, the author himself, in a sudden access of naïveté and sincerity affirms 
towards the end of his endeavour: ‘inanzi voglio confuso esser nel dire/ ch’i’ 
voglia alchuna cosa preterire’ (‘I would rather be confused in my words, but 
without leaving out anything that I have to say’). ‘Perhaps we can be so bold as 
to read these lines as Dati’s declaration of poetics. We might call “confusion” 
the creative hallmark of the canterino style’ (94).

Christopher Geekie’s ‘ “Parole appiastricciate”: The Question of Recitation 
in the Tasso-Ariosto Polemic’ dwells, one more time in this volume, on texts 
in octaves, produced in Renaissance Italy. But with Geekie’s contribution we 
are very far away from the clumsy canterino style of Giuliano Dati. Geekie 
transports the reader to the opposite end of the fortune, in Italy, of the poems 
in octaves. He deals with the most sophisticated, learned literary product of 
that format: Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, and the heated debates 
that this poem triggered among the Italian literati of the time. It is a field 
of study which has enjoyed much scholarly attention, from both sides of 
the Atlantic: the Italian mid-sixteenth century discussions about ‘epos’ and 
‘romanzo’ are by now recognized as nothing less than a precocious, brilliant 
laboratory (or incubator) of modern narratology. Scholars, though, have 
concentrated their attention especially on the subjects of materia and favola, 
i.e. the question of the structure of the narrative text; much less emphasis 
has been accorded to the problems of style, or ‘elocution’, that is the actual 
‘sound’ of Renaissance poems. In this sense, Geekie’s contribution is a novelty, 
since it digs out a particular, yet very telling moment of the polemics which 
accompanied the shocking – for the time – emergence of a poem like Tasso’s 
Liberata. In general, what was discussed in these polemics was the relationship 
of Tasso’s poem with Ariosto’s; or his more or less rigorous compliance with the 
new rules dictated by the re-discovery of Aristotle’s Poetics. But the Florentine 
Accademia della Crusca – the arch enemy of the novelties introduced by Tasso 



riccardo bruscagli16 

in his poem – also attacked the Liberata on another front. In the words of 
the ‘cruscante’ Lionardo Salviati: 

‘[The poem] has neither beautiful words, nor beautiful figures of speech … and 
both are beyond any natural manner of speaking. They are bound together in such a 
distorted, harsh, forced, and unpleasant way that, upon hearing these words recited 
by someone else, rarely does one understand them, and it is necessary to take the 
book in hand and read the words on our own. These words are such, that sound and 
voice are not enough, and to understand them you must see the writing. Sometimes 
even that is not enough.’ (100n.) 

The target of the criticism by the Florentines are the so called parole 
appiastricciate, or mashed-up words, of which these malevolent readers 
provide quite a colourful list: checcanuto, impastacani, crinchincima, etc. It 
is quite a humorous move, but a very significant one. First of all, it implies a 
consideration of the epic text of the Liberata as one made not just to be read, 
but to be read aloud, to be recited: because only the ‘voice’ could produce 
such cacophonies: the reader does not even perceive them. And this is the 
point of Geekie’s article: what kind of ‘reading aloud’ of the text did the 
Crusca have in mind? Can we only consider their observations the fruit of 
a biased, malevolent attitude against Tasso’s poem? This was, naturally, the 
stance of Tasso’s defenders: they stated, in general, that only by ignoring 
the punctuation, the rhythm of the verse, and only purposely obeying the 
metric elisions of the words, could one obtain the distorted, almost comical 
readings of the Crusca. But according to Geekie ‘the Crusca’s combination of 
entire phrases into single nonsense words occurs as a result of several reading 
strategies’ (105). Essentially, the Crusca applied to Tasso’s verses a pure 
metrical reading: ‘An analysis of the metrical schemes that emerge in these 
mashed-up words will reveal a particular mode of reading lines of poetry that 
emphasizes regular accentuation at the expense of both the sense of the line 
and its graphical representation’ (106-107). In a way, the counter-objections 
of Tasso’s advocates, like Camillo Pellegrino, seem obvious: 

‘if one word is separated from another, and uttered with a pause, then they will not 
produce an ugly sound, especially in those positions in the verse, where it is possible, 
or where it is praiseworthy, to do so. In those positions where it is necessary to combine 
words, rarely does Tasso join together two sounds whose pronunciation ends up 
sounding ugly. On the contrary, there are words, which the academicians call ‘mashed-
up’, which sound most sweet. But, by God, what are these monstruous transformations 
of Tasso’s words that make children of rage from children of grace?’ (108n.) 

What is culturally significant, though, is that the purely metrical reading 
of the Crusca is deemed by the cruscanti naturale: as if this were the only 
spontaneous manner of pronouncing aloud a poetic text. The conflict here is 



editorial 17 

not only between two ways of reciting poetry aloud, but between two different 
ways of simply ‘speaking’: one of Tasso’s defenders negatively associates 
the ‘mispronouncing’ of the Crusca with the bad habit of speaking in an 
incomprehensible way censured in Della Casa’s Galateo. Thus, the ‘parole 
appiastricciate’ of the Crusca’s reading of Tasso’s poem are assimilated, tout 
court, with the ugly pronunciation of those who do not know how to talk 
and interact in a social environment. On a larger scale, this whole polemic 
reveals a strong tension between the way a late Renaissance poem could be 
perceived (as a text to be read, and/or a text that could be recited); between 
a text as a visual product, where comprehension is helped by a whole series 
of graphic conventions, and a text as pure sound, subjected to a plurality of 
possible executions, and fruitions. After all, the conflict between a ‘metric’ 
reading and a reading ‘ad sensum’ is at the core, even today, of the curriculum 
of every Actor’s School.

Ecclesia non theatrale negotium est: ‘The Church is no show business’. St 
Ambrose’s words resonated for centuries, drawing – it seemed – an unsurpassable 
line between the sacred space of religion and the secular space of the stage. But, 
in reality, as the essay by Teresa Megale – ‘Animated Pulpits: On Performative 
Preaching in seventeenth-century Naples’ – demonstrates, that border was very 
weak, and various figures of performers, especially in the Baroque era, used to 
go across it with surprising ease. A colourful anecdote reported by Benedetto 
Croce (we are in Naples, after all) says it all: we are in the streets of the city, 
where the conflicting performances of Pulcinella and a religious preacher are 
taking place: ‘The former allegedly attracted crowds with his irresistible gags, 
laughter overpowering catechism to the extent of making the preacher, who 
was so outclassed and humiliated, unsuccessfully try to dissuade the onlookers, 
by shouting: “Over here – this is the real Pulcinella!” ’. As Megale notes, ‘The 
scene of a prescher outclassed by an actor, … probably never took place’, and 
yet, it is ‘ symptomatic of performative psychotechniques widely employed 
to attract (and maintain) the hearers’ attention’ (132), both in a sacred and 
in a secular space. The fact is that these spaces, as shown by this anecdote, 
where not so separate, even in a physical sense. The street was the competing 
arena of many performers: charlatans, actors, and preachers too. On the other 
hand, the ‘proper’ religious space for preachers – the Church – was, pace St 
Ambrose, very much prone itself to the show: in the ‘protective semi-darkness 
of churches’ (129-130), in the dim light of candles, the Neapolitan preachers 
of the seventeenth century were no less actors than their secular counterparts: 
indeed, someone lamented that, in comparison, ‘in the leading theatres, he 
heard the faded, weak voices of the actors, while those of the preachers in 
Catholic churches were worthy of the best theatrical professionals’ (132). Not 
only that: the technique of reportatio, i.e. the transcription, in real time, of the 
words uttered by the preacher, was a custom no less common in churches than 
in theatres, where specialized stenographers were able to ‘steal’ the texts while they 



riccardo bruscagli18 

were performed: ‘… while the preacher pronounced his words resounding with 
Catholic teaching, a scribe often squatting on the pulpit steps, half-hidden from 
the throng of the faithful, wrote them down, amid the flickering of candles and 
clouds of incense’ (131). The permeability between the pulpit and the stage, after 
all, is clearly demonstrated by those who personally shifted allegiance between 
the two professions: ‘Before becoming lay brethren attached to the order of Piarist 
fathers who preached to the populace in the Duchesca district, Andrea della Valle, 
Francesco Longavilla, and Orazio Graziullo were, respectively, the impresario and 
actors at the “stanza della Duchesca” venue, opened in 1613 in the district of the 
same name, and in operation successfully up to 1626’ (131). And not only that: 
not only opposition could convert into allegiance, but even into a sort of overt 
complementarity. Megale quotes, in this sense, some eloquent written documents, 
which aimed to teach the art of performance both to secular actors and religious 
speakers, or introduce the spectacular character of the baroque theatre into the 
sacred spaces of religion: 

It is enough to mention I divini spettacoli nella notte di Natale (‘The Divine Performances 
on Christmas Eve’), and Il Mostro scatenato per le Quarant’ore del carnevale (‘The 
Monster Let Loose for the 40 Hours of Carnival’) in the Orationi sacre by Azzolini 
(1633) to understand, beginning with the titles, the close link of the sacred with the 
profane, pulpit with stage. This was clearly visible in the continual crossover between 
the two phenomena: methods and techniques were taken from the theatre, but with 
selective eyes and ears. Even Louis de Cressolles, when, in his Vacationes autumnales 
(1620), he recorded the preacher’s repertoire of gestures, prescribed that the latter should 
avoid certain examples of the actor’s body language: the head not moving up and down, 
for example, a typical stance of the comic Zannis in the Commedia dell’Arte. (134) 

And yet, we can infer, from the examples quoted by Megale, that such 
‘infractions’ must have been quite common, and that all resources of baroque 
theatricality, in fact, infiltrated the preaching technique of Neapolitan preachers. 
The final example cited by Megale, of the Redemptorist Father Ludovico 
Antonelli, is conclusively persuasive. The use of a skull, on the pulpit, as a true 
theatrical prop, says it all: a prop to which, when turned towards the audience, 
the preacher himself lent his own voice, with a chilling ‘special effect’ nothing 
short of the most elementary, but suggestive stage tricks.

The following essay, by Antonella Giordano, pushes the subject of ‘literature 
aloud’ into the eighteenth century, dealing with the phenomenon of women 
improvisers. The title, which borrows a verse from a sonnet by Vittorio Alfieri 
in praise of one of these performers – ‘ “Donna il cui carme gli animi soggioga”. 
Eighteenth-Century Italian Women Improvisers’ – clearly declares the span 
and limits of this contribution: the time, the type of performing technique, 
the language and geography (Italian) considered, and finally the gender choice 
of the author of this essay. Male improvisers, and very famous ones, abounded 
in the eighteenth century: among them, even Pietro Metastasio in his youth 



editorial 19 

– Metastasio, to whom we owe one of the most beautiful definitions of this 
profession: ‘inutile e meraviglioso mestiere’ (‘useless and marvellous art’). 
But Giordano concentrates on female improvisers, and, namely, on the three 
most famous of them: Maria Maddalena Morelli (Corinna Olimpica), Teresa 
Bandettini, and Fortunata Fantastici Sulgher. Giordano’s contribution, thus, 
also crosses the field of gender studies, contaminating the inquiry about the 
peculiarities of this ‘inutile mestiere’ with the further ‘oddity’ constituted by the 
fact that the improvisers dealt with here are women. In any case, a preliminary 
clarification is necessary. As Giordano rightly reminds us, eighteenth century 
‘improvisation’ is very different from the improvisation of the previous centuries 
– which is the object of reflection in many pages of this volume. The difference 
is, first of all, that the act of improvising in the eighteenth century leaves the 
streets, the piazza, open spaces, or even the theatre (if we want to consider the 
Commedia dell’Arte as a pure form of improvisation): in the eighteenth century 
the most famous improvisers would perform in private or semi-private spaces, 
in front of an audience gathered at the command of a patron (or patroness) 
who was the host of the event. This ambiance, infinitely more protected, and 
this kind of audience, in general carefully selected, allowed another seminal 
characteristic of the more modern art of improvisation: the performer would 
actually ‘improvise’ on a subject suggested, on the spot, by a member of the 
audience. His/her ability consisted exactly in the capacity of ‘composing’ poetry 
with very little time – or none – for reflection and preparation, almost under 
the spell of a rapturous inspiration. This was the element that triggered the 
almost fanatical admiration that accompanied such performances and that 
Giordano vividly describes in her essay, quoting an archival document, as rare 
as it is totally explicit about the nature of the phenomenon: the reportage (in 
the form of a letter by a Dr. Piccioli from Lucca to his friend Giovanni Rosini) 
of a combined performance by Bandettini and Fantastici: 

Dear friend, I have just left like a madman, a fanatic, overwhelmed and almost delirious 
by the famous improvisation. What beauty, what magnificent, unrepeatable, divine 
things I heard this evening! Never will I experience anything like it again … The theme 
was requested; nobody spoke. Alfieri, from his corner, said ‘Let us start with the Rape 
of Europa’. This theme was unacceptable, since it could not be conducted as a dialogue, 
as they wished. So Hero and Leander was suggested. Fantastici began in the role of 
Leander very well. Bandettini also did well in the role of Hero. I cannot tell you how 
well both contestants did, how the dialogue was to the point and how interesting it 
was. They were both well applauded. One seemed to instil the other with courage … 
then Alfieri’s theme was recited by Bandettini. My friend, her words were incredible. 
What vivid descriptions. She depicted a bull finer than that of Ovid’. (148n.)

The sex of the performers, naturally, adds to this subject another layer of 
interest. Here ‘reciting aloud’, once again, reveals its risky vicinity with 
the actual performance of professional actors. This vicinity is particularly 



riccardo bruscagli20 

dangerous when the figures involved are female, given the usually very poor 
moral reputation of professional actresses – despite the centuries-old repeated 
attempts (from Isabella Andreini on) to establish, defend and demonstrate 
the possibility of a perfectly moral private life of the ‘women of theatre’. But, 
as Giordano demonstrates, it was not just a question of morality. The three 
women improvisers here considered went a long way to keep, and validate, 
their status of honourable women, accurately trying to distinguish themselves 
from ‘real’ actresses: after all, they never performed on regular stages. And 
yet, theirs was a real profession, and they were paid for it: once again, it was 
difficult to trace rigorous lines of demarcation between ‘reciting’ and ‘acting’. 
What is more interesting, though, is the consideration that these women had 
of their repertoire. This had nothing to do, naturally, with the repertoire of 
regular theatres, which was the product of illustrious (male) writers. Sure, as 
Giordano observes a propos of this female professional figure, ‘Her repertoire 
was grounded in solid academic study and general knowledge, enabling her to 
deal with any subject proposed, good knowledge of metre, so as to create her 
verse quickly, and a good memory’ (143). But, tellingly, 

both Amarilli and Corilla refused to publish the transcriptions of their improvisations, 
imagining the risk of transferring to the page and print poems composed for listeners. 
Extempore poetry is a violent, impetuous exercise which can give rise to marvellous 
though intermittent, random results and does not produce permanent values. Proud of 
their talents, but also quite aware of the specificity and limits of their art, both of them 
realised that it was impossible to preserve its merits beyond a public performance. (152)

In conclusion, the ‘useless and marvellous art’ of improvisation is probably the 
most eloquent specimen of a ‘literature aloud’ destined to evaporate without 
leaving behind any trace (not even something similar to the canovacci of the 
Commedia dell’Arte). The presence of female figures of limited education in 
this scenario (Bandettini had been nothing more than an illiterate dancer, 
before her success as an improviser) simply accentuates this characteristic of 
this intrinsically evanescent phenomenon. Very well conscious of the ephemeral 
quality of their success, these intelligent women kept themselves cautiously 
away from any pretension of immortal fame as writers. For them, the fanatical 
admiration of their listeners was enough – and they knew it.

The last contribution to this volume – ‘Reading Aloud in Britain 
in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century: Teories and Beyond’, by 
Roberta Mullini – might appear to revolve around a very specific subject: 
the phenomenon of British ‘elocutionism’ in late eighteenth century. In fact, 
Mullini’s essay faces fundamental questions raised by the relationship between 
written and oral texts, or rather, by the usage of written/printed texts as scripts, 
outside, though, the professional space of the stage. In other words, Mullini’s 
contribution addresses the basic issues of the very subject of ‘literature aloud’. 
The ‘elocutionst’ movement is reconstructed here primarily following the texts 



editorial 21 

and the activity of its protagonists: Vicesimus Knox, the very successful author, 
in the mid-Eighties, of Elegant Extracts: Useful and Entertaining Passages in Prose 
Selected for the Improvement of Scholars at Classical and Other Schools in the Art of 
Speaking, in Reading, Thinking, Composing; and in the Conduct of Life; Thomas 
Sheridan, author of British Education: or, The Source of the Disorders of Great 
Britain. Being an Essay towards proving, that the Immorality, Ignorance, and false 
Taste, which so generally prevail, are the natural and necessary Consequences of the 
present defective System of Education. With an Attempt to shew, that a Revival of 
the Art of Speaking, and the Study of our own Language, might contribute, in great 
measure, to the Cure of those Evil (1756; and this is not even the complete title…); 
John Walker, author of Elements of Elocution (1781), and of a very influential 
Critical Pronouncing Dictionary (1791); plus, a series of booklets in Sheridan’s 
wake, in general ‘reading miscellanies’, some of them, again, with eloquent titles 
(A collection of Poems for Reading and Repetition, The Speaker, and so on). All 
this quite massive, and impressive, production, culminated, right at the end of 
the century (1799), in the anonymous The Reader or Reciter: a title that seems to 
summarize the equivalence between the act of ‘reading’ and the act of ‘reciting’, 
that is, reading aloud, making explicit the ambiguity of the term itself (what do 
we mean by ‘reading’? A silent, or a vocal activity? The ‘elocutionists’, obviously, 
had no doubt about it). This phenomenon is linked to the impetuous growth, 
in England, of a voracious audience of consumers of literature: not only read 
in private, but in public, to an audience. As a consequence, being able to speak 
clearly, correctly, with the right intonation, became a requirement for social 
acceptance and success: the quotation from a letter by Elizabeth Montagu, that 
Mullini has put as an epigraph to her essay, says it all: ‘Mr Hay is an auditor, for 
he is not able to read aloud’. It is to help all the Mister Hays to transcend the 
role of a passive ‘auditor’, into that of an effective speaker, that so many efforts 
– and books, and booklets – were produced. The stress was on pronunciation, 
of course, but also, inevitably, on body language. As Mullini emphasizes, 

in 1762 Sheridan published A Course of Lectures on Elocution, in which he expounded his 
theories about delivery, including not only pronunciation and grammatical correctness, 
but also everything that might contribute to effectiveness, i.e. emphasis, tones, pauses, 
pitch, gesture … all the tools a reader/speaker has in order to convey passions beyond 
literal meanings. (163)

Which, naturally, raises again the old problem: the fragile, porous, risky borders 
between the reading aloud of a common speaker, and the actual performance 
of an actor. The ‘elocutionists’, though, did not seem so worried or disturbed 
by the siege of the professionals; actually, they willingly overcame the border 
themselves, very well aware of the possible, positive, reciprocal influence of 
‘secular’ elocution and theatrical performance. In Walker’s book, for example, 
‘each passion is exemplified by dramatic passages, generally drawn from 
Shakespeare’, to the point that ‘this part of Walker’s text best resembles a 



riccardo bruscagli22 

handbook for drama students rather than a series of instructions for “simple” 
readers’ (167); Sheridan trained not only common speakers, but also young 
actors, well convinced that ‘the Theatre would become an admirable Assistant 
to the School of Oratory, by furnishing to the young Students constant good 
Models and Examples in all the different species of Eloquence’ (162). The 
least intimidated by the possible contamination of the common reader by his 
resemblance to an actor seems to be (maybe not surprisingly) the anonymous 
author of The Reader or Reciter: he does not recoil from giving ‘instruction 
for reading plays’, exposing the costume of reading aloud, in private settings, 
texts destined to the actual stage; as Mullini observes, in this author’s view, 
‘a reader ought to create a “stage” (a scene) in the hearer’s imagination, while 
actors perform on a stage whose scenery already shows places and venues to 
the onlookers. In a way, readers’ responsibility is even greater than actors’ when 
creating “aural” settings’ (172-173). The fluid passage between ‘reading’ and 
‘performing’, in conclusion, seems to have been encouraged, and not curbed, 
by the elocutionist movement. 

Mullini’s essay leads to a last, and crucial, question associated with the 
habit of reading aloud: the relationship of this habit with literacy – or rather, 
illiteracy. Quoting Adam Fox, Mullini asserts that even when most people 
were still illiterate, ‘Reading aloud helped to draw everyone into the ambit 
of the written word’, adding that ‘public places such as taverns, barber shops 
and, especially, coffee-houses offered the illiterate the opportunity to listen to 
somebody reading aloud the various printed materials available in those venues’ 
(158). At the end of her essay, Mullini concludes that 

Eighteenth-century British society lived through an era of vast improvement of literacy, 
especially in the middle class, and of female literacy, so that the century’s great novels 
were certainly written not only for silent reading but with an ‘ear’ to family and shared 
readings, when possibly illiterate servants might as well be present. The now nearly 
lost practice of reading aloud created and reinforced sociability, while – at the same 
time – allowing the illiterate to access literature and any other printed material. (174)

This certainly sounds like a very happy ending for the research conducted in 
this volume. The only thing one is much tempted to peek beyond the time 
limits of this research is to reflect on what has happened after the scene here 
described. One wonders if those servants, those women, those poor people 
remained listeners, or if they finally learned how to read themselves; if to be 
listening truly introduced them to literature, or kept them content in their semi-
ignorance; and, regarding today, one might consider how to judge the reduced 
habit of reading silently, privately, while ‘listening’ seems – again – so pervasive, 
so triumphant. Molinari, in his introductory essays, touched on these issues: 
it was not planned, but maybe inevitable, that they had to resurface at the end 
of this intellectual journey.

Riccardo Bruscagli