Dr Stefano Dall'Aglio: Sermons, Orality and Writing in Early Modern Italy.
The study of past orality has been neglected for a long time, despite the fact that it represented by far the most significant section of verbal communication. More specifically, sermons are mainly an oral genre, and in early modern Italy they were one of the central events of everyone’s life. My current research focuses on the orality of early modern Italian preachers and on the relationship between their spoken and written sermons. How did a sermon change from its written draft to its delivery, and from its delivery to its subsequent written and oral versions? What was the role of language and gestures, and how did the audience (whether hearers or readers) affect the text and the preacher’s performance? My research puts at the centre of its analysis an elusive element—the preacher’s voice—that has forever disappeared. I am trying to show that it is not impossible to reconstruct a part of early modern orality, but at the same time I argue that all the remaining written versions of a spoken text diverge deeply from the original one. Many early modern Italian sermons have come down to us in the form of handwritten transcriptions or printed editions, and the authors of this written texts often claim that they correspond exactly to their oral versions delivered from the pulpit. Nevertheless, to what extent can we rely on a transcription written during the sermon or on a printed version, often revised and amended even by the preacher himself?