Textual Cultures of Medieval Italy ed. by William Robins (review)

This collection of essays, edited by William Robins, which grew out of the conference ‘Textual Cultures of Medieval Italy: Editorial and Other Approaches,’ held at University of Toronto in 2005, offers a thorough overview of the central issues regarding how one defines and understands the complex of meanings around the term ‘textual.’ As Robins notes in the introduction, linking the term ‘cultural’ with ‘textual’ indicates that the volume’s goal is to broaden the study of textuality beyond the idea of the printed book by considering textual habits, practices, and challenges within a plurality of venues from poetic practice, to public texts, to linguistic and editorial conundrums.

The essays, written by well-established scholars, include Ronald Witt’s examination of the change in the form of letter writing styles, Maria Bendinelli Predelli’s consideration of the structure of ottava rima in early Italian cantari, Nicholas Everett’s discussion of the form and content of Paulinus of Aquileia’s Sponsio episcoporum, and Susanne Lepsius’s careful examination of the task of ‘Editing Legal Texts from the Late Middle Ages.’ They are not restricted to one approach but rather draw on many fields: law, art, cultural history, literary studies, and philology. The organizational structure of the volume – based on forms, materials, administrative and collaborative cultures – immediately signals the broad range of inquiry around textuality. Robins’s comprehensive overview of the past and current state of medieval textual cultures frames the essays.

In the first section devoted to forms, Christopher Kleinhenz’s ‘Adventures in Textuality’ reveals how the poetic form of the tenzone was both a vehicle for literary debate and a means of correspondence in the poetic circles of fourteenth-century Italy and offers a glimpse into the mystery around the earliest mention of the dolce stil novo. In her essay, ‘Public Textual Cultures,’ Linda Safran discusses texts written in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek within the public domain of the Salento region of Southern Italy. Considering the various kinds of texts – dedicatory, or didactic, for example – which could be ‘written’ on stone, metal, cloth, wood, or plaster, Safran calls for an interdisciplinary approach that combines art history and epigraphy to understand the importance of these public texts.

Considering textuality within the administrative world, Luca Boschetto looks at the use of vernacular Italian and the role of foreign notaries who were employed within the Florentine Merchant Court, the Mercanzia, to record transactions. Boschetto examines how challenges facing these notaries – who had to abandon the professionally accepted Latin for Florentine Italian – contributed to the formation of Italian. In the final section on collaborations, Dominique Poirel sets out to solve the mystery of Angela of Foligno’s Liber Angelae, and the questions surrounding the text, by testing the truth and reliability of the texts and the veracity of the voice. Poirel argues for the necessity of collaboration between philology and history in order to answer the challenges of the fourteenth-century text.

Each of the essays in this worthwhile volume is well-researched, clear, well-written, and thought-provoking. They will appeal to a wide range of scholars, certainly within medieval studies, but not limited to this field. The broad approach of the scholars, coming from many different disciplines, means that those interested in art history, literary studies, philology, careful textual readings, and cultural historical analysis will find a rich resource here.