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eBook
The Unruly Tongue
2025
Overview
A cultural history of speech in medieval Italy
The Unruly Tongue , a cultural history of speech in
medieval Italy, offers a new account of how the power of words
changed in Western thought. Despite the association of freedom of
speech with the political revolutions of the eighteenth century
that ushered in the era of modern democracies, historian Melissa
Vise locates the history of the repression of speech not in
Europe's monarchies but rather in Italy's republics. Exploring the
cultural process through which science and medicine, politics, law,
literature, and theology together informed a new political ethics
of speech, Vise uncovers the formation of a moral code where the
regulation of the tongue became an integral component of republican
values in medieval Europe. The medieval citizens of Italy's
republics understood themselves to be wholly subject to the power
of words not because they lived in an age of persecution or
doctrinal rigidity, but because words had furnished the grounds for
their political freedom. Speech-making was the means for speaking
the republic itself into existence against the opposition of
aristocracy, empire, and papacy. But because words had power, they
could also be deployed as weapons. Speech contained the potential
for violence and presented a threat to political and social order,
and thus needed to be controlled. Vise shows how the laws that
governed and curtailed speech in medieval Italy represented broader
cultural understandings of human susceptibility to speech. Tracing
anthropologies of speech from religious to political discourse,
from civic courts to ecclesiastical courts, from medical texts to
the works of Dante and Boccaccio, The Unruly Tongue
demonstrates that the thirteenth century marked a major shift in
how people perceived the power, and the threat, of speech: a change
in thinking about \"what words do.\"
Publisher
University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc,University of Pennsylvania Press
Subject
ISBN
9781512827132, 1512827134
