Words of Violence in Early Modern Italy
Palazzo Rucellai, Florence
11 December 2015
9.00am-6.00pm
This international conference focuses on written injurious words: humanist invectives,
religious and political smear, slanderous libels and pasquinades. Social historians
have variously engaged with the meanings and practices of verbal slur, gossip, and
physical violent acts such as homicide, suicide, and punch-ups. This conference
explores instead the conventions of written texts and how hurling textual insults was
an effective (and affective) way to establish identity and gain consensus across
diverse social echelons.
This conference will qualify the type of violence unleashed by these slanderous texts
and examine the connection between page and social context, as suggested by Judith
Butler. In order to comprehend which words wound, one needs to understand the
ritualization of linguistic injury and a sphere of practice that goes beyond the moment
of utterance or the written page.
The conference is generously supported by:
The Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of
Emotions, Europe 1100-1800 (CHE)
International Studies Institute (ISI Florence)
9.00-9.15am
Welcome Remarks: Stefano U. Baldassarri (ISI Florence), Andrea Rizzi
(CHE/The University of Melbourne), and Nick Eckstein (CHE/The University of
Sydney)
9.15-10.00am
John Gagne (CHE/The University of Sydney)
Policing Words in the French States: Between Paris and Milan, 1494-1534
Beyond the military challenges France faced in asserting dominion over Italy, public
order became a central concern to the authorities surveying French rule north and
south of the Alps. The streets of French-administered cities were a laboratory for
French policy, since they were where public suspicion, satirical theatre, and cheap
print forged opinions. Discontent found articulation in language both comical and
virulent. Abrasive discourses of resistance proliferated in varieties of media. This
paper compares the fortunes of media and opinion in French states during the Italian
Wars, both in France and abroad. It also sheds light on the way that public debate and
official control over it changed during the course of the wars and laid the groundwork
for repressive responses to dissent in the 1530s. While the 1534 Affair of the Placards
was the most infamous religious crackdown on print in France, this paper argues that
it had its political precedents in the wartime media disputes of the earlier sixteenth
century. It thus sheds light on the interrelationship of two types of violence: languages
of resistance and their subsequent repression in the era between the Italian Wars and
the early Reformation.
10.00-10.45am
Eva Del Soldato (University of Pennsylvania)
How to Destroy an Enemy: Bessarion against George of Trebizond
This paper aims to investigate the strategies adopted by cardinal Bessarion in order to
destroy the credibility of his adversary George of Trebizond in his In calumniatorem
Platonis. Trebizond, whose name is never pronounced, is referred to in ways that
constantly allude to his clumsiness, brutality and ignorance. Bessarion is even willing
to be self-contradictory in order to win the battle, a battle that he would have in any
case won for many other reasons, including his decision to print his book.
10.45-11.15am Coffee break
11.15am-12.00pm
Catherine Kovesi (CHE/The University of Melbourne)
Honeyed Poison and Blaspheming Feet: Blaming Women for Transgressive Dress
in the Renaissance
It is well known that the Renaissance in Italy was a time of opulent and extravagant
dress for both sexes. In Carole Frick’s estimation, elite men could spend up to 40
percent of household income on clothing their families. It is also well known that such
clothing was subjected to rigorous attempts at regulation by city governments.
However, whilst in many cases men’s clothing was far more dazzling and eyecatching than that of women, it was the latter’s clothing that was subjected to greater
regulation, by a large margin. In condemning such clothing’s use by women, city
governments, preachers, chroniclers, and even on occasion women themselves,
sometimes used descriptive language of bracing insult, violent denigration, sinful
condemnation, and hostile misogyny that is completely absent from the discourse
about clothing for men. This paper examines a few of these vituperative examples and
explores the indelible links made between women, transgression, and clothing that has
continued in different manifestations to the present day.
12.00-12.45pm
Giovanni Tarantino (CHE/The University of Melbourne)
Of ‘Concinism’ and violent language in eighteenth-century Italy: From the
‘teologia mamillare’ controversy to the exposure of the ‘sciocchissime chimere’ of
Deists
Friar Daniele Concina (1687–1756) was a highly erudite and pugnacious Dominican
who advocated an orthodoxy so strict as to trouble his own fellow brothers and the
‘Enlightenment Pope’ Benedict XIV; he also took the view that the corruption of
habits and customs of his age originated from the modern heresy of Protestantism and
the theological laissez-faire of the Jesuits. The secularizing and desacralizing trends
of the Enlightenment seemed to Concina to be the inevitable offspring of a religion
that had become nerveless, accommodating and ‘benignist’ (a response to the Jesuits,
who accused ‘rigourists’ of turning people into enemies of religion). His aversion to
theatre attendance and to any form of dispensation from fasting during Lent, and the
notorious verbal violence of his writings, led to the coining of a new and
contemptuous term: ‘concinismo’. In this paper, I will examine Concina’s defence both virulent and informed - of revealed religion against deism and indifferentist
tolerationism. I will also consider the satirical violence of a retraction attributed to
him but actually concocted by the Jesuits, possibly by the prolific polemicist
Giambattista Faure. The continual ‘tugging at hood and collar’ of the Jesuits and
Dominicans soon came to be widely seen as futile wrangling that merely troubled the
peace of mind of the broader community.
12.45-2.15pm Lunch break
2.30-3.30pm
Elizabeth Horodowich (New Mexico State University) and Andrea Rizzi
(CHE/The University of Melbourne)
Unmasking the Gondolier: Sex, Violence, and Freedom
In Fabio Glissenti’s Discorsi Morali (1596), a gondolier talks with a philosopher and
courtier about his life and work. The philosopher commiserates with the gondolier for
his life of uncertainty and poverty, to which the gondolier replies that he has more
power than it seems: he can rock the boat to get more money from his customers and,
if they still manage to get away without paying the due rate, he can insult them and
damage their honour irreparably. This paper examines how foul language, homosocial
relationships, and social mobility allowed gondoliers to safeguard their business,
improve their social status, and create social resistance. By examining Glissenti’s
texts and other contemporary sources on gondoliers and their performance of violent
speech, this paper will shed light on the system of violent language and the social
upheavals created by dirty words in early modern Venice.
3.30-4.15pm
Nick Eckstein (CHE/The University of Sydney)
Violent Rage in Italy: Medieval, Renaissance, Early Modern and Now
In August 1343, a crowd of ‘enraged people’ exacted a fearful revenge on Florence's
Conservator of the Laws, first by butchering his son, then by eviscerating the
magistrate himself. Thirty-five years later, during the legendary uprising of the city's
lower classes (the Ciompi), a police official was ‘cut into pieces’ by angry
revolutionaries. In Naples, in 1585, still another crowd expressed outrage at a
government decision to reduce the standard size of a loaf of bread by kidnapping,
publicly humiliating and murdering the people's elected representative, Giovanni
Storace. After tearing the eletto to shreds some apparently wished to consume his
organs. One frenzied protestor even ‘took a piece of the bloody shirt and ate it’, while
another ‘sucked the blood’.
These incidents are well known and have been the object of detailed study by
historians of medieval and early-modern Italy. I would like to ask some broader
questions about what the historian of emotion does with such material. This paper will
conduct an unusual experiment, comparing pre-modern outbreaks of collective rage
with a number of operatically violent murders orchestrated by members of Sicily's
cosa nostra in our own times. Doing so foregrounds unexpected parallels in language
and practice, which in turn raise challenging questions. On the surface, modern
mafiosi seem to be singing from the symbolic hymn book used by their exasperated
pre-modern forebears, but is this really the case? More fundamentally, can (or should)
rage be compared across the centuries? Can this chaotic emotion be pinned down and
examined in the first place?
4.15-4.45pm Coffee break
4.45-5.30pm
Peter Howard (Monash University)
Words of Violence and Renaissance Preaching
Preachers were fundamental to moderating values, meaning, and behaviour in the late
medieval and early modern Italian city. They were much sought after for making the
peace, as Linda Polecritti, Francesco Bruni, and others have shown. This paper
discusses sermons in Quattrocento Florence that focused not only on discord
(discordia) but also on speaking passionately (contentio) and on violent speech (rixa).
5.30-6.00pm Roundtable and Concluding Remarks