The unmannered tongue: Blasphemy, insults, and gossip in Renaissance Venice.

Abstract

This project examines political and cultural constructions of speech and conversation in early modern Venice. While many writers from Cicero to Aquinas had considered the importance of spoken language, early modern Italy witnessed an explosion of interest in this topic as a result of the combined cultural and social changes of the Renaissance and Reformations. As the sixteenth-century center of the printing industry, a vibrant commercial port, and a pilgrimage city, Venice offers a unique arena in which to explore the notion of public speech since the social control of laborers, immigrants, and foreigners demanded verbal discipline. This thesis uses a variety of sources---books of comportment, legal compendia, proverbs, civic statutes, chronicles, anatomy texts, legislation, and most importantly court cases---to demonstrate that both the Venetian State and its citizens were profoundly concerned about regulating verbal exchange. Considering the roots and effects of these anxieties in Venice roughly between 1525 and 1600, the study makes three principal arguments. First, the Venetian state gave new attention to public language in the sixteenth century, punishing unmannered language such as blasphemy, foul language and insults more frequently and severely than ever before. This increased focus on disciplining the tongue arose from a variety of economic, political, and cultural factors, including new levels of immigration and declining commercial fortunes. Second, conceptions of class hierarchy in Venice were both reflected in and constructed by language as public speech adhered to newly articulated aristocratic models of containment and control. Third, through its investigation of gossip, the dissertation addresses issues of speech and gender. While gossip was coded by male writers as feminine, destructive speech, in practice the gender component of gossip remained inherently unstable as both men and women gossiped as a means of conflict resolution in the neighborhood, workplace, and government itself. The Republic's formal use of structured rhetoric and oratory was only part of the way that Venetian politics worked, as the more fluid speech of gossip also fueled political life. In short, this is a study of the expectations and anxieties surrounding public, verbal exchange among sixteenth-century Venetians.