Re-Writing Trent, or What Happened to Italian Literature in the Wake ...

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new documentary evidence for centres other than Venice. 3 This research has been extremely valuable in opening out the field, and a large amount of helpful information has been uncovered about censorship in Italy in the second half of the sixteenth century. At the same time there has perhaps been a lack of sufficient correlated research in recent years examining the same period from different perspectives, those outside the official machinery of the church authorities. Thus the official viewpoint of effective repression has become unnaturally dominant. This is particularly true for research into the production of popular vernacular literature in the decades after Trent. The assumption has persisted that the majority of popular literature from the late Cinquecento was nothing more than a necessary response to the Tridentine curbing of intellectual freedoms, a devotional outpouring designed to contain nothing challenging to official orthodoxy. The view that „Italian literature lost much of its vitality‟ still needs to be effectively challenged and nuanced, as a corrective to a tendency to overstate the effectiveness of censorship practices. This paper thus forms part of a broader attempt to challenge the negative view of „post-renaissance‟ popular Italian literature, and to resituate it in a context in which literary innovation and vitality can be seen to be still very much at work. I use the term „post- renaissance‟ in a deliberate nod to the long-standing tendency to measure Italian literary production post-1560 against the period of the high renaissance and find it lacking, as the new classicising and reformed literary aesthetics of the later period failed to chime with the literary sensibilities of subsequent historical eras. Proper attention to vernacular texts from the late Cinquecento across a range of genres helps to demonstrate, rather, the burgeoning of what Virginia Cox has fittingly described as a „“new model literature” for a reevangelized 3 See for example Gigliola Fragnito, ed., Church, Censorship and Culture in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), and the bibliography contained therein. See also the following more recent works: Gigliola Fragnito, Proibito capire. La Chiesa e il volgare nella prima età moderna (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2005); Elisa Rebellato, La fabbrica dei divieti: Gli indici dei libri proibiti da Clemente VIII a Benedetto XIV (Milan: Sylvestre Bonnard, 2008); Ugo Rozzo, La letteratura italiana negli ‘Indici’ del Cinquecento (Udine: Forum, 2005). 2
age, transforming past models to contemporary ends‟. 4 Equally, attention to the variety of modes in which texts circulated and reached new audiences in the period helps to alert us to the continued energy that writers and readers invested in their products, Indexes and Inquisition notwithstanding. Notably, some of the most popular literary genres of the late sixteenth century have been the most neglected by subsequent scholarship, including in particular vernacular devotional poetry and hagiographic works in poetry and prose, which poured from the presses in great numbers. The tendency has been to assume that such texts, because they appear to be wholly orthodox, or because there are so many of them, are lacking in any literary merit or scholarly interest. Such a view fails to allow for the possibility of „heterodox‟ content within seemingly standard genres, nor does it concede that „orthodox‟ literature can also be interesting or creative in its own right. Matthew Treherne has recently argued very convincingly for the need for a reappraisal of Tasso‟s late works: „modern scholars have largely neglected the possibility that the orthodoxy of the later works might represent not intellectual inhibition, but the discovery of new theological and poetic resources.‟ 5 As with Tasso (who has always anyway been set apart from other writers of the period as an exception) so too with other, far less famous writers of the period. Faced by a new religious and literary climate, good writers don‟t simply cease to exist, just as astute readers don‟t cease to seek out interesting and challenging texts. Rather authors find different means of expression to suit the new age and readers respond accordingly. Our task as twenty-first century readers, by no means straightforward, is to learn how to be up to the work of reading such texts with nuance and appropriate historical understanding, in order to reclaim them from the literary backwater where they have been languishing. 4 Virginia Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy 1400-1650 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), p.136. 5 Matthew Treherne, ‘Liturgy as a Mode of Theological Discourse in Tasso’s Late Works’, in Forms of Faith in Sixteenth-Century Italy, ed. Abigail Brundin and Matthew Treherne (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), pp.233-53 (p.233). 3
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Re-Writing Trent, or What Happened to Italian Literature in the Wake ...

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