Date/Time
Date(s) - 26 Mar 2012
6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
Location
NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò
Category(ies) No Categories
“FANNO BANDIRE, NOTIFICARE, ET EXPRESSAMENTE COMANDARE…”
The Information Economy of Renaissance Florence
A lecture by
Stephen Milner
March 26 at 6 p.m.
Department of Italian Studies
Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò
24 West 12th St.
In the history of the late medieval and Renaissance revival of interest in the classics much has been made of the recovery of the classical rhetorical tradition and the renewed emphasis on the importance of oratory and public speaking in the cities of the Italian peninsula. This paper seeks to add a previously neglected public voice to the rhetorical canon by focusing attention on the town criers of Renaissance Florence. At regular intervals the city’s judicial magistracies issued calls for information regarding criminal activity through the public declamation of bandi, official announcements made from a number of sites around the city. The survival in written form of these oral proclamations not only sheds light on a range of everyday activities which escaped the eye of contemporary police officials but also reveals fascinating insights into the information economy of a premodern city in the days before surveillance cameras. Judge for yourself whether the relation between voice, knowledge and power is any different now from back in the fifteenth-century. The talk will be in English.
Stephen J. Milner is Serena Professor of Italian at the University of Manchester. He works on Italian medieval and early modern history and literature and on the history of rhetoric. He is the editor of At the Margins: Minority Groups in Pre-Modern Italy (University of Minnesota Press, 2005), and the co-editor of The Erotics of Consolation: Desire and Distance in the Late Middle Ages (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). He is currently working on a book on rhetoric and politics in late-medieval and Renaissance Florence.