Languages and Anti-Languages in Early Modern Italy

Author(s): Peter Burke

Source: History Workshop, No. 11 (Spring, 1981), pp. 24-32
Published by: Oxford University Press
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Languagesand anti-languages
in early modern Italy
by Peter Burke
I.

Like other social historians, some of them in this journal, I have been trying to follow
current debates in sociolinguistics. These debates have helped to make us aware of the
need to take languages seriously as social phenomena and to attempt to write their
history. To become aware of language is to do more than discover yet another interest-
ing topic to be added to the programme of social historians. It is also to realise the
impossibility of writing any social history without sensitivity to the social meanings
carried by the languages in which our documents are written. The medium is a
message, if not the message, and social historians cannot afford to be deaf to it.
Since the time of Dante, at least, educated Italians have been interested in the
questione della lingua, the best form of Italian for writing or speaking.' Controversy
naturally engendered self-consciousness and also awareness of variations in the usage
of other people. Hence there are relativelygood sources for a social history of Italian in
the 16th and 17th centuries. However, most of the work remains to be done.
It is true that there are modern studies of the language of individual writersof this
period which are subtle, sophisticated and socially aware; some of them are cited in the
footnotes. But of course social historians need more than studies of the idiolect of
Aretino (say), or Ruzante. What we need is a map of the whole linguistic terrain at dif-
ferent periods, both to situate our documents and to interpretchange over time. There
are some useful histories of the Italian language at this period, but they do not offer
what a social historian needs. They do not ignore society, but their model of the links
between language and society seems too simple, particularlyafter one has read some
contemporary sociolinguists, who have gone beyond the simple assertions that differ-
ent social groups speak different varieties of language and that linguistic change is
related to social change.2
With the help of these sociolinguists, I want to provide an extremely provisional
account of linguistic variety and linguistic change in early modern Italy, in the hope
that specialists in language and literaturewill be provoked into correcting and refining
it. There are three points made by sociolinguists which it may be useful to stress at the
outset.
1. The same people use different 'codes' (by which I mean no more than 'varieties of
language') on different occasions, in different 'speech domains'. Codes are 'switched'
according to the listeners (friends or strangers, for example), the setting (formal or
informal), and even the topic (discussions of religion often seem to requirea relatively
formal code even in an informal setting).3

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 Languages andAnti-Languages 25

2. Language reflects society, or rather, 'echoes' it. Codes have social meanings. To
the trained ear, language is a sensitive indicator of social relationships such as defer-
ence, familiarity, and so on, as in the frequently-studied cases of modes of address;
Tu, Voi, Lei, Ser, Messer, Signore, Madonna, and so on.4 Again, language indicates
loyalty. The use of Sicilian ratherthan Italian may express solidarity. So may the use of
the various forms of criminal slang, igerghi della malavita, as Italians call them. In this
latter case we may suspect that a 'counter-culture', that is, a subculture in conscious
opposition to ordinary society, is expressing itself in an 'anti-language'.5
3. We have just been treating language as passive; as echo or indicator. However,
language is also an active force in society. Social climbers use language to give them-
selves a leg up. Social groups use private languages to socialise their new recruits, to
make them think with the group, or to exclude outsiders. About Italian thieves it was
said in the 16th century that 'slang was invented by the upright men to speak among
themselves when they were in a tight spot':

Fu dai dritti il gergo inventato

per parlare solo tra loro
quando sian giunti a un passo pericoloso.'

A Roman beggar arrested in 1595 told the authorities that there would be a general
meeting of beggars the following May 'to change their slang [mutare il gergo di
parlare]' because outsiders had cracked their code.7

II

These basic ideas should make it a little easier for social historians to achieve their
ideal, which is surely to map the contours of the main languages and anti-languages in
use in a given place and time; to know the rules - how to greet people in the street, how
to ask for a drink, how to be polite, how to insult - in other words, to reconstruct a
retrospective ethnography of speaking.8
The problems of finding the evidence will be obvious enough. Early modern
historians not only have to study the oral through the written, they have to investigate
the language of ordinary people by means of records made by outsiders to this particu-
lar speech community, or set of communities. What deserves a little more stress is the
amount and variety of the Italian evidence. The sermons of San Bernadino of Siena
were taken down in shorthand, giving us a text which has a really colloquial sound to
it.9 Interrogations by the Inquisition, in their concern for accuracy, often catch the
spoken word with apparent precision."' Plays are a good source of evidence, though
more difficult to use because we have to learn to distinguish stylisation and parody
from direct transcription. 16th-centuryplays suggest, for instance, that the language
of the peasants was more archaic than that of townsmen.I()a
Or take swearing, as recorded in some 16th-centuryVenetian comedies. The play-
wrights certainly draw some fine distinctions, for the characters can be arrangedon a
spectrum from non-swearers to hard swearers. In La Venexiana, for instance, the
high-status widow Angela saysperl 'amordi Dio, 'for the love of God'; the servant-girl
Oria, per questa Crose, 'by this Cross'; but the male servant Bernardosays diavol, 'the
devil', cancar, 'canker', and chigasang, 'shit blood'." In the plays of Ruzante, in
which the characters speak Venetian and Paduan dialect, we can distinguish girls such

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26 History WorkshopJournal

as Dina, who say sora questa fe, 'on my faith'; old patricians such as Messer
Andronico and Sier Tomao, who say diavolo; al corpo di mi, 'on my body'; al corpo di
Santa Cataruza, 'on the body of saint Kate'; the servant (or peasant) Ruzante himself,
who prefers cancaro and pota, 'cunt'; and rougher peasants such as Bilora who outdo
him with al sangue del cancaro, 'blood of the canker', or sangue del mal dela loa,
'blood of the wolf's sickness'. '2
Of course the evidence is better still for the retrospective ethnography of writing,
the study of who wrote to whom about what and on what sorts of occasion.'3
Historical studies of literacy have had little to say so far about these questions, and in
any case studies of literacy in early modern Italy are not very numerous. 14 However,
there were a number of guides to letter-writing, complete with model letters, currentin
Renaissance Italy, and they might be a good basis for rough classification of such
letters. Obvious divisions would be i) the love letter, ii) the business letter, and iii) the
begging letter. The begging letter might be subdivided into a) requests for money, and
b) requests for jobs and other favours, or alternativelyinto a) requests on behalf of the
writer, and b) requests on behalf of someone else, relative, friend, client or whatever. 15
Despite all the problems, I should like in the remainderof this paper to attempt to
answer two very big questions. The first, what were the main codes employed in early
modern Italy, by whom and for what purposes? The second, how did these socio-
linguistic structures change over time? The answers will be as brief as they are pro-
visional.
A linguistic map of early modern Italy might start with the coexistence within the
peninsula not only of different speech codes but also of different languages in the
literal sense of the term. There were pockets of Greek, German, Dalmatian and
Albanian. More important was Latin, employed as a second language, a spoken
language as well as a written one, spoken in the academic domain (universitylectures)
as well as the ecclesiastical (masses). That Latin was spoken in ecclesiastical courts is
suggested by a complaint of Menocchio, the miller of Friuli recently brought back to
life by Carlo Ginzburg:

I think speaking Latin is a betrayal of the poor because in lawsuits the poor do not
know what is being said and are crushed; and if they want to say four words they
need a lawyer. 16

Awareness of the manipulative functions of language is clearly nothing new. Latin was
of course even more important as a written language in Italy in this period, a language
which came in several varieties, the Latin of the notaries, the humanists and the
churchmen being rather different from one another.
Then there was French, which had been especially important as a literarylanguage
in the 13thand 14thcenturies. One might say that some of the most important works in
Italian literaturein this period were in French, including the Tresorof Dante's teacher,
Brunetto Latini; Marco Polo's account of his travels, Le Divisament dou Monde; and
Martin da Canal's Cronique des Veniciens. French seems to have been particularly
current in the north. It was spoken as well as written, and it seems to have been
employed particularlyfrequently in the speech domain of chivalry. Roland had not yet
become Orlando.'7 The language of love, on the other hand, was occitan, and Italian
poets like Sordello (Browning's hero, who lived in Mantua in the 13thcentury), wrote
in it.
However, the most obvious point to make about the socio-linguistics of early

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 Languages and Anti-Languages 27

modern Italy is of course the variety of regional codes. Other points about dialect are
rather less obvious. I assume that most ordinary people, craftsmen, peasants and their
wives, spoke only their local dialect, and also that most educated people knew a dialect
and could speak it on occasion. But on what occasions would they do this? What were
the rules? Very little is known about this. No doubt an urban patrician spoke dialect to
the peasants on his estate, because there was no other way of being understood.
Presumably he spoke dialect to his servants for the same reason. Possibly he spoke
dialect to his wife. Little is known about the education of women in this period, but it is
hard to see how many women could have been fluent speakers of anything but their
local dialect. One suspects that dialect was spoken on all informal occasions, that it
served as a marker of such occasions. It was certainly a sign of playfulness on some
occasions; in Milan about 1600, a festive society to which the painter Lomazzo and
some noblemen belonged, chose to speak in the dialect of the Val di Bregno, the area
from which the wine porters of the city of Milan were recruited.18However, dialect in
early modern Italy can hardly have been the symbol of informality which it is in Italy
today, because dialect was also spoken on a number of formal occasions.
To take Venice as an example - whether typical of Italian regional culture of the
period in this respect, it is too early to say. In Venice, patricians spoke dialect to one
another on informal occasions. The reaction of one of them, late in the 18th century,
to the election of Manin as doge, is a celebrated example: 'I gafato dose un forlan, la
republica xe morta [they have made a man from Friuli doge, the republic is dead]'.
Patricians also spoke Venetian to one another on some formal occasions, for example
at the meetings of the Great Council and the Senate.'9 Advocates spoke Venetian in
court (the secular courts, as opposed to the church courts mentioned above).20In these
cases of the use of Venetian on formal occasions, the obvious explanation is that
dialect symbolised autonomy.
Venetian patricians also wrote in Venetian, as well as in Italian and Latin. The
range of meanings and associations of dialect are a little difficult to pin down in these
cases. There were associations with the comic; the dialect form was appropriate for
comedy because comedy, in Renaissance literary theory, was a low subject which
deserved a low style. In the case of the love poetry of Maffeo Venier, written in the late
16th century, one wonders whether the poet chose dialect because it allowed him to
write in an uninhibited way about sex.2' Another association of dialect seems to have
been with ordinary people, with unofficial culture; in that sense dialect was 'anti-
language'. This is surely the clue to its use in political contexts, as in the case of the
Lamento deipescatori veneziani of c. 1570, an anonymous poem which is critical of
the policies followed by the government of the time. The poem appeals to Venetian
egalitarianism and it is put into the mouths of fishermen; hence it has to be in dialect.
Who is speaking to whom through this poem and for what purpose is not altogether
clear. We should not assume that the fishermen themselves wrote it; it may well be a
case of one patrician faction making points against another. But the use of dialect goes
with the strategy of saying that 'the people' do not like what the government is doing.
This is, in all probability, the linguistic equivalent of a manipulated 'popular' revolt.
However, we cannot be sure that the Lament does not represent genuine popular atti-
tudes .22
A still more awkward case to interpret, and one which has exercised a number of
literary critics, is that of the plays of Ruzante, already discussed in the context of
swearing. 'Ruzante' was the stage name of Angelo Beolco, who was in the service of
Alvise Cornaro, a Venetian nobleman living in Padua, and wrote plays in which he

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28 HistoryWorkshopJournal

played the role of a comic servant or peasant who spoke the rural dialect of the Padua
area. The use of this dialect no doubt amused the urban audiences in Padua and Venice
who did not speak like that themselves. But the use of this dialect gives an added bite to
Ruzante's Schweik's-eye-view of the Venetian wars - in this sense the laugh may be on
the Venetians. At a time, the 1520s, when the high style of literary Italian was being
codified (by a Venetian, Pietro Bembo), the use of dialect may also express a critique
of this high style, an anti-language for an anti-Renaissance. We cannot be sure. No
doubt Ruzante did not want the audience to be sure, even at the time.23
A map of the languages spoken and written in early modern Italy must leave con-
siderable space for occupational jargons, like the slang of the beggars and thieves,
already mentioned, a slang which is relatively well recorded because it attracted the
interest of literary men during the Renaissance. The 15th-century Florentine comic
poet, Luigi Pulci, has left us a little manuscript vocabulary of fifty-one words and
phrases from the jargon (gergo, zergo) of beggars and thieves: window was ventosa,
'the windy one': road was polverosa, 'the dusty one'; money was brunetti, 'little
brown ones', and so on.24The 16th century nuovomodo di intenderela linguazerga,
already quoted, gives us vivid phrases for stealing (alzare, 'to lift'), being hanged
(andar in Picardia, to go to Picardy, a pun on impiccare, the normal word, and on the
picardi, or 'Bohemians'), and for a doctor (of law or medicine: Dragon, 'a dragon').25
Underworld jargon is not the only well-documented speech domain from early
modern Italy; the court is another. La cortigiana lingua, 'court language', was a
language spoken by certain kinds of people, in certain kinds of place, and about
certain kinds of topic. The best guide to it remains Castiglione's Courtier, published in
1528, the work of a participant observer who knew the speech domain from inside but
was sufficiently detached to look at it from outside and analyse its principles.
So far I have been discussing how courtiers spoke to courtiers, thieves to thieves, or
Venetians to Venetians. However, no map of language in early modern Italy would be
complete without a discussion of the ways in which different social groups communi-
cated with one another. To a modern reader, one of the most striking and alien
features of the texts of this period is the language of hierarchy, the elaborate
vocabulary of deference, the formality of modes of address. Non-reciprocal tu is a
classic example, not of course confined to Italy, but important there. A contemporary
chronicle records, for example, the shocking incident at Florence in 1378, when a
shoemaker used tu to the patrician, Carlo degli Strozzi; this was of course during the
revolt of the Ciompi, the unskilled workers in the woollen cloth industry, a revolt
which was seen by the upper classes as turning the world upside down.26
Some of the most important points to look for in the language of hierarchy were
conveniently recorded for us by a Genoese patrician of the early 17th century, Andrea
Spinola, a critic of the inegalitarianism of his age. He warned young men not to play
the grandee by saying tu to the watchmen. He describedhow his fellow-citizens, 'better
furnished with money and imagination than with wisdom', distinguish between greet-
ings to equals (me ricommando, 'I recommend myself', or son tutto suo, 'I am all
yours'), and greetings to superiors, (baciar le mani, 'I kiss your hands', or vostro
schiavo, 'your slave'), deferences which Spinola regarded as 'unworthy of a free
city' 27

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 Languages andAnti-Languages 29

III

After this sketch-map of some of the main socio-linguistic variation in modern Italy, it
is time to sketch what appear to be the more important changes of the period - though
in the strict sense it is not a period at all, because there do not seem to be any major
breaks between the age of Dante and the age of Cavour. It may be useful to distinguish
six points, though they are part of a complex of interrelatedchanges taking place in the
16th and 17th centuries.

1. The decline of French and Latin as written and spoken languages. It is difficult to
be precise about either the timing or the extent of these trends. The decline of French is
probably uncontroversial, and had largely taken place by 1500; the case of Latin is
rather more complicated. Was it in continuous decline? Lionardo Salviati, a 16th
century scholar who devoted considerable thought to this question, thought that Latin
recovered lost ground from the death of Boccaccio, in the late 14th century,
onwards.28The lack of a Short-Title Catalogue for Italy makes it difficult to calculate
the percentage of books published in Latin and Italian in different decades, which
might provide a definite answer to the question. However, what is obvious is the
increasing employment of the vernacular for serious purposes. In the 16th century, it
was adding to its functions.
2. With the change in the functions of the vernacular goes a change in form. A
stronger need is felt for a vernacularwhich is 'standard' or 'correct'. There are debates
about the form of this purified vernacular. In practice, the job came to be done by
Tuscan, which spread among educated people in other regions as a written language,
and probably as a spoken language as well, though it is obviously hard to be sure how
far this was the case and whether or not Tuscan was modified as it spread. This move-
ment of 'Tuscanisation' seems to have been continuous from about 1300onwards, and
it had important cultural consequences, such as the split between learned culture and
popular culture (though of course there were other reasons for this split).
From a comparative point of view, the relative autonomy of this linguistic trend
deserves emphasis. The linguistic hegemonies of south east English, north east French,
Castilian and Mandarin, for example, all seem to follow and derive from the political
hegemonies of these regions over their neighbours. In Italy, the story is different. The
hegemony of Florentine over other forms of Tuscan, such as Sienese, might
reasonably be explained in political terms, but the hegemony of Tuscan over other
dialects cannot. This is not to say that the language question was of no political interest
in the 16th and 17th centuries; on the contrary, Cosimo de'Medici, the first Grand
Duke of Tuscany, took a strong interest in the promotion of Tuscan, which he seems to
have regardedas a source of prestige for his regime. My point is simply that the Grand
Dukes of Tuscany did not exercise hegemony over Italy, so that the spread of what
might be called the 'Tuscan standard' cannot be explained in political terms.29
The obvious explanation for Tuscanisation is a cultural one. Dante, Boccaccio and
Petrarch were all Tuscans, and it was their literary achievement which spread their
language. Tuscanisation is the triumph of a cultural centre over a peripheryratherthan
the triumph of a political centre. One might add that it was the Italian political balance
- or vacuum - of the period which allowed cultural factors to be relatively
autonomous. In other words, freedom from political pressures may have a political
explanation. The spread of printing is another factor to be taken into account in any

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30 History WorkshopJournal

discussion of Tuscanisation, but what it explains is how the winner in this race
increased its lead over competitors, not how it came to win in the first place.30
3. As Tuscan replaced Latin as the literary lingua franca, there was pressure to
classicise it, to enunciate rules based on the usage of the great writers of the past. The
Venetian cardinal Bembo, in an influential treatise he published in 1525, argued that
the linguistic models were the great Tuscan trio of the fourteenth century, Dante,
Petrarch, and Boccaccio.3' Another influential rule-maker was the Florentine
Lionardo Salviati, who opposed both writing in Latin and employing Latinisms in
written Italian. Christopher Hill has recently described the style of Daniel Defoe, in
History Workshop Journal 10, as 'class-conscious in its avoidance of Latinisms.' In
the cultural context of England around the year 1700he may well be right, but Salviati,
equally hostile to Latinisms, did not identify with ordinary people. Anti-classical in his
opposition to Latin, he was a classicist in his approach to Tuscan, which had to be
polished in order to serve as a new standard in Latin's place.32
In the middle of the 16th century, Cosimo de'Medici of Tuscany was involved in
this movement of polishing Tuscan. The Florentine Academy, which he had taken
over, set up a committee in 1550to preparea grammar, a movement which reached its
climax in the publication in 1612 of the dictionary of the 'Crusca', a group associated
with the Academy. The parallel with the French Academy a century later will be
obvious enough. In fact Cosimo did organise a mini-absolute monarchy and a profes-
sional bureaucracy, and there is, perhaps, an elective affinity between bureaucracy
and linguistic rules.
4. Another linguistic trend visible (or rather, audible) in the 16thand 17thcenturies is
the trend towards increasing formality in forms of address both in speech and writing.
A famous example of the trend is the decline of tu and voi and the rise of lei, regretted
by 16th century traditionalists.33It was only one of a set of connected changes. In the
later 17th century, an elderly Florentine patrician, Tommaso Rinuccini, looking back
on his youth, noted, again with regret, the rise of ceremony in speech and writing in his
own milieu. The nobility at the beginning of the century, he remarked, used to say
Vostra Signoria, 'Your Lordship', to one another, and to write to one another in the
same way, signing off affezionatissimo servitore, 'your most affectionate servant'.
But then the title of marchese came in, and with it the use of illustrissimo, 'most
illustrious', as a form of address in letters, and:

most obliged, most devoted, most humble servant, and similar phrases, according
to whether one wanted to be more or less adulatory, or obsequious.. . and finally
we have gone so far as to use the term illustrissimo in speech as well, and even
ordinary people use it to gentlemen, even the poor when they beg for alms.34

Like the Genoese Andrea Spinola earlier in the century, Rinuccini had a strong dislike
for this new-fangled formality, but he seems to have been swimming against the
current.
Why did this change take place? Is it an example of the 'refeudalisation' of Italian
society? This is not the place to become involved in a debate over terminology which
(however concerned with language) diverges from the main theme of this paper.
Suffice it to say that historians tend to agree that Northern Italy in the 16th and 17th
centuries was a less open society than it had been, and less distinctive a part of Europe
than it had been in the 13th and 14th centuries. Trade and industry generally, though
not always, stagnated or declined. City republics gave way to territorialstates, like the

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 LanguagesandAnti-Languages 31

Tuscanyruledby ArchdukeCosimode'Medici;and societyofferedfeweropportuni-

ties to new men. It seemsplausibleto suggestthatthe growingformalityof modesof
addressexpresseda reactionto thesetrends.
5. These trends towardsTuscanisation,rules, and formalitydid not take place
uncontested.Inhis dialogues,lettersandplaysof the 1520sand 1530s,PietroAretino
was, surely, answeringBembo. The colloquiallanguage,the swearwordsand the
obscenitieshe favoursare a deliberateuse of what Bembo would consider 'anti-
language'.The referenceto Bemboand his rulesis most transparentwhen Aretino
refersto a womanwho, four hundredyearsbeforeAlan Ross and NancyMitford,
declaredthata windowhadto be calleda balcone,not afinestra;thatit was 'U' to call
face visobut 'non-U'to sayfaccia, andso on.35Again,in 1612,a certainPaolo Beni,
who taughtat Padua, publishedhis Anticrusca,an attackon the authorityof the
recently-published Cruscadictionarymentionedabove, in otherwordsa defenceof
whatthe Cruscaconsidered'anti-language' againstthe Tuscanstandard.It is an indi-
cationof how seriouslythe politicsof languagewastakenin the 17thcenturythatthe
Archdukeof Tuscanywroteto the VenetianSenateaskingthemto haveBeni'sbook
suppressed.
These cases of resistanceto the new orthodoxiesare highlyself-conscious,but
otherexamplesaremoreproblematic.Shouldwe includethe playsof Ruzante,with
their Paduandialect?Or the love lyricsof Maffeo Venier,in Venetian?Are they
examplesof dialect used for comic effect, or as an unselfconsciousexpressionof
regionalconservatism,or a deliberateprotestagainstTuscanlinguistichegemony?Of
course each case has to be consideredindividually.The generalconclusionis that
standardisationdid not so much drive out the alternativesto correct speech as
transformtheirmeaning.Classicismand anti-classicism,languageand anti-language
developedtogetherand fed off one another.36
6. A lastingresultof the controversyabout correctlanguagewas to make people
linguisticallyself-consciousto an unparallelleddegreeand thus to give us better
sources,on whichthispaperhasbeenbased.Interestin thehistoryof Italian- as of so
manyotherinstitutions- wasthe by-productof debatesoverits reform.

1 R.A.Hall, The Italian questione della lingua, Chapel Hill, 1942; & M.Vitale, La
questione della lingua, Palermo, 1962.
2 B.Migliorini, Storia della lingua italiana, 2nd ed., Florence, 1960; T.De Mauro, Storia
linguistica dellI'talia unita, 2nd ed., Bari 1976, starts in 1860.
3 D.Hymes, 'The ethnography of speaking' (1962), reprintedin J.Fishman, ed., Readings
in the Sociology of Language, The Hague, 1968; J.Fishman, 'Who speaks what language to
whom and when' (1965), revised version in J.B.Pride and J.Holmes, ed., Sociolinguistics,
Harmondsworth 1972.
4 R.Brown and A.Gilman, 'The Pronouns of Power and Solidarity' (1960), reprinted in
P.P.Giglioli, ed., Language and Social Context, Harmondsworth, 1972; S.M.Ervin-Tripp,
'Sociolinguistic rules of address' (1969), reprinted in Pride and Holmes, Sociolinguistics.
5 E.Ferrero, I gerghi della malavita, Milan, 1972; M.A.K.Halliday, 'Antilanguages',
American Anthropologist 1976; contrast I.Calvino, 'antilingua' O.Parlangeli, ed., La nuova
questione della lingua, Brescia, 1971, for whom 'anti-language' is what *we tend to call
'officialese'.
6 A.Brocardo, 'Nuovo modo di intendere la lingua zerga' (1531), reprinted in Ferrero.
7 P.Camporesi, ed., II libro dei vagabondi, Turin 1973, p.359.
8 Compare Hymes and Fishman, note 3 above; and C.O.Frake, 'How to ask for a drink in
Subanun' (1964), reprinted in Giglioli.
9 I.Origo, The World of San Bernardino, London, 1963, p.6.
10 C.Ginzburg, Cheese and Worms, London, 1980.

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32 History WorkshopJournal

1Oa J . Brunet, 'Le paysan et son language', Villeet campagne dans la litterature italienne de
la Renaissance, ed. A.Rochon, Paris, 1976.
11 L.Zorzi, ed., La Venexiana, Turin 1965. This anonymous play dates from the early 16th
century.
12 Ruzante, L'Anconitana, ed. L.Zorzi, Turin, 1965; id., Due Dialoghi, ed. L.Zorzi,
Turin, 1968. All these pieces date from the early 16th century.
13 K.H.Basso, 'The ethnography of writing', in R.Bauman and J. Sherzer, ed.,
Explorationsin the Ethnographyof Speaking,Cambridge,1974.
14 For a general picture, see the special number of Quaderni Storici, 'Alfabetismo e cultura
scritta.' (no38)
15 Frequently-reprinted examples include G.A.Tagliente, Formulario, Toscolano, 1538;
F.Sansovino, Secretario, Venice, 1564; F.Scardino, Formulario, Padua, 1569.
16 Ginzburg, Cheese and Worms, p.9.
17 G.F.Folena, 'La cultura volgare e l'umanesimo cavalleresco', in V.Branca, ed.,
Umanesimo europeo e umanesimo veneziano, Florence 1964.
18 G.P.Lomazzo, Rabisch dra Academigli dor Compa Zavargna, Milan, 1627 (but
originally 1589).
19 G.Georgelin, Venise au siele des lumieres, Paris and The Hague, 1978, p.574, p.977
n.230; c.f. R.Finlay, Politics in Renaissance Venice, London, 1980, p.229.
20 N.Vianello, 'II veneziano, lingua del foro veneto', Lingua Nostra, 18, 1957.
21 M.Venier's poems are printed in N.Ruggieri, Maffio Veniers.I., 1909.
22 The Lamento is reprinted in M.Dazzi, ed., Fiore dellalirica veneziano, 1, Venice 1956,
pp.444f.
23 For Ruzante, see note 12 above. P.Bembo, Prose della volgar lingua, Venice, 1525.
24 Pulci reprinted in Camporesi (note 7)
25 Nuovo Modo reprinted in Ferrero, note 5; another version in Camporesi.
26 II Tumulto dei Ciompi, ed. G.Scaramella, Bologna, 1934, p. 14.
27 A.Spinola's Ricordi Politici or Dizionario can be found at Genoa in a number of
manuscript versions. I used the one in the civic archives, fondo Brignole Sale, 106B, 11-12.
28 L.Salviati, Avvertimenti, Florence, 1584; on him, P.Brown, Lionardo Salviati, Oxford
1974.
29 S.Bertelli, 'L'egemonia linguistica', Bibliotheque d'Humanisme et Renaissance, 1976.
30 E.Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. Cambridge, 1979, pp.80f,
discusses printing and standardisation.
31 As above, note 23.
32 As above, note 28.
33 The comments of contemporaries such as Caro, Ruscelli and Tolomei are discussed by
B.Croce, La Spagna nella vita Italiana durante la Rinascenza, Bari, 1917, pp.182ff. Compare
Brown and Gilman, note 4.
34 T. Rinuccini, Usanzefiorentine del secolo xvii, Florence, 1863.
35 P.Aretino, Sei Giornate, Bari, 1975, p.82.
36 Some of these problems discussed in N.Borsellino, Gli anticlassicisti del '500, Bari,
1973.

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