Levels of Culture in Italy during the Early Modern Period

The recently published volume Verba manent. Livelli di cultura in Italia nella prima età moderna (Verba Manent: Levels of Culture in Italy during the Early Modern Period), edited by Vittorio Celotto and Gennaro Schiano, takes its cue from a series of seminars held as part of the DisComPosE activities in the spring of 2021. The volume includes essays by the two editors, as well as Giancarlo Petrella, Ottavia Niccoli, Marina Roggero, and Claudio Giunta.

The collection revisits the issue of the relationship between subaltern and hegemonic cultures in Italy during the early modern period (from fifteenth to eighteenth centuries).

The notion of popular culture, although it has experienced varying fortunes in the humanities, remains a fundamental question for anthropological, historical, and literary research, as it allows us to explore the dynamics of communication or conflict between different cultural levels.

The individual chapters are dedicated to various literary genres (prophecy, song, popular romance, informative pamphlets), with the aim of offering an analysis of the relationships between media (orality, manuscripts, print) and the forms of reception and appropriation of texts in heterogeneous social environments.

Drawing on integrated methodological approaches (ranging from history to literature, from philology to bibliology), the objective is to observe how texts, knowledge, and social practices are transmitted and intersect in Italian society under the ancien régime, spanning courts, churches, and public squares.