Strong Words: Writing and Social Strain in the Italian Renaissance. .

Lauro Martines. Strong Words: Writing and Social Strain in the Italian Renaissance.

Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. xvi + 360 pp. index. bibl. $49.95. ISBN: 0-8018-6574-3.

Words of love, of prayer, of adulation and supplication, of anger, scorn, and derision: these are the strong words of Lauro Martines' deft dissection of Renaissance society. Rather than track the spoor of this oral culture through its judicial archives in the hope of catching some happenstance record of words strong enough to provoke an action for libel or define a person's public fama or infamia, Martines undertakes a systematic examination of the literary texts that proclaimed in their time, and preserved to ours, emotional utterances in their most condensed and crystalline form. As he observes, "Literature offers us a unique highroad to the past, for the simple reason that its expressiveness may be as plain as blistering insult or so devious and artful as to suit the most subde social situation" (xiv). And it is above all the social situation that Martines seeks to illuminate. Though attuned to the formalities of genre and alert to the timelessness of literary emotion, as to the idiosyncrasies of poetic ex pression, Martines argues that literature nonetheless testifies to a particular time and place, and so makes a proper subject for historical inquiry.

Martines reads his literary sources with the same thoroughness and critical acumen that he once applied to fiscal documents and legal consilia, surveying thousands of poems by more than a hundred poets and hundreds of tales by scores of authors from all over northern and central Italy. Florence and Tuscany are prominently represented, as one would expect given the preeminence of Tuscan writers in Italian literature between 1300 and 1560; but he includes as well authors from Milan, Bologna, Perugia, Genoa, and elsewhere. Several chapters treat the standard themes and tropes, recurrent images, and habitual turns of phrase that characterized particular genres, with an eye to the moral ambivalence and social strain inherent in the urban neighborhoods or relationships that occasioned and consumed these strong words. That love poetry fairly twitched with the tensions of a society built on arranged marriages of convenience should cause no surprise; but it is startling to see the adulatory and fretful language of lov e lyrics reappear so exactly in the laments of clients snubbed by their patrons, or in petitions addressed to virgin saints. Even more striking are the close studies of two profoundly alienated personalities: the irascible and self-loathing Saviozzo of Siena, cursing his mother's genitals and taking a knife to himself, and the urbane Francesco d'Alt degli Alberti, taxed into oblivion and penned in his house by the threat of imprisonment for debt. Similar juxtapositions of a particular life and oeuvre could, I think, similarly deepen the resonances of a number of works that here exemplifjy general themes. For example, Giovanni Dominici's poetic depiction of the doting Virgin Mary fondling her little Jesus, which Martines cites to illustrate the vivid realism of poetry in contrast with the decorous formalism of painting (51-52), surely owes much of its emotional charge to Giovanni's upbringing as the sole surviving child of his widowed mother.

My chief complaint about this elegant and potent book is its restrictive insistence on the revelatory power of literary texts. As an aficionado of vernacular chronicles, I would take exception with Martines' brusque dismissal of "traditional historical sources such as chronicles and other forms of flat (prose) documentation: these require no concerted analysis in the literary-social mode" (266). For all their apparent artlessness, chronicles can reveal the passions, obsessions, rancor, and affections of their authors as clearly as the poetry of a Francesco degli Alberti does his -- if they are read with the informed and sensitive intelligence that Martines applies to Alberti's poetry. Nor would I agree that "[a]s a guide to the minds and sensibilities of people, the flat document, the prosaic record, must always be... oversimple and perfunctory" (267). Of course, any historian's presentation of Victorian England is bound to blur and fade beside the indelible precision of Dickens' characters and settings, but so too will nearly any other novelist's. As evocations of human emotions and social interactions, scholarly readings of the documentary record may all too often seem oversimple and perfunctory; but must they always be so? The fault, I fear, lies not in our documents, but ourselves. 'When read well, read wisely, read above all imaginatively -- in a word, when read as Martines reads his love sonnets, political canzoni, and cruel beffe -- even so prosaic a text as an account book or an inventory can disclose just as effectively as poetry "the ways in which people both daydreamed and carried out their ordinary activities under an aura of social ideals and stresses"