Street singers were crucial figures in Italian Renaissance urban culture, mediating between printed, written and oral forms of communication. Performing in the central piazza, they offered entertainment, news, satire and commentary on current events to heterogeneous publics. But as the communicative capacities of the singers reached their peak, increasingly their presence in the city was seen as threatening and disruptive. The struggle for control of the piazza became particularly bitter in the later sixteenth century, when civic and ecclesiastical authorities strove to render public urban spaces more orderly and magnificent and to police the borders between sacred and profane spaces, times and ideas.
many different names (and one might think of even more) must indicate many different things. Or do they?They all refer to the street singers and performers of Renaissance Italy, and at first sight they appear to designate many distinct specializations within the large spectrum of interrelated activities that they carried out in the piazzas and marketplaces of the peninsula. Hence, cantastorie or canterini would be the specific names for the poet-singers, whose principal trade was to perform verses, stories, and songs, usually to musical accompaniment, in urban public (or semi-public) spaces, and whose mastery of words and music even allowed them to improvise their compositions; saltimbanchi or ioculatori would be used for the acrobats, jugglers, dancers, and conjurers, whose skills were physical more than verbal; istrioni and buffoni for the actors, either playing parts in comedies or performing solo their best set pieces; cerretani and ciurmadori for the charlatans and pedlars who advertised and sold their multifarious wares to passers-by whom they mesmerized with speeches, gestures, and images. Yet, all those wandering entertainers and itinerant salesmen were so protean, and therefore so elusive, that the more we deepen our knowledge of them (as far as the scarce documentation allows us to), the more we wonder whether the abovementioned labels really designated different arts and professions, or rather different aspects of the same multifaceted identity. If we try to create a taxonomy of the street singers, all of their different social and cultural characteristics no longer appear as distinct categories or careers. For the sake of convenience, in this issue we have chosen to favour the term cantastorie, but most of them could in fact be labelled with many other different names, depending on which of their facets was showing on a given occasion, or in a specific context, or in a particular period of their career.Cantastorie were, in the first place, oral poets. The heirs of medieval minstrels and jesters, they entertained, educated, and informed their audiences with a manifold repertoire 150 LUCA DEGL'INNOCENTI AND MASSIMO ROSPOCHER of narrative, lyrical, didactic, and dramatic works, either of other authors or of their own, drawing upon both the anonymous popular tradition and the production of canonical writers; historical and chivalric epics were one of their typical subjects, but they also sang about politics and current affairs, as well as performing amorous, comic, moral, religious, scientific and fantastical verses. Secondly, while their capacity to entrance broad audiences was founded on the attraction of their voices, they were often also skilled musicians, sometimes excellent players of stringed instruments such as the viola da braccio, to whose accompaniment they sang their verse. Thirdly, many of them were also successful actors and buffoons, as their vocal, mimetic, and mnemonic skills made them capable of impersonating different characters, each of them displaying a specific language and repertoir...
This essay aims to investigate from a combined historical and literary perspective the protean and elusive figures of early modern Italian street singers, or cantastorie, showing the advantages and challenges of an interdisciplinary approach. Both textual analysis and archival investigation, we argue, are of crucial importance in order to shed some light on their social identity as well as on their cultural background. Cantastorie are in fact so multifaceted that the same figure is often known to different scholars in a variety of roles. Depending on a scholar’s discipline, or on the sources used, a single face emerges, making them appear either as poets or as singers, or as musicians, actors, jugglers, barkers, publishers, booksellers, entertainers, news‐reporters, public lecturers, medical charlatans and many other things. By focusing on three paradigmatic examples (and on several minor ones), we show that in order to draw an all‐round portrait of these itinerant performers we have to combine as many different perspectives as possible: Jacopo Coppa was a charlatan, Niccolò Zoppino a publisher, and Cristoforo the Altissimo a poet, but all of them – like most cantastorie – were also several other things at the same time. Therefore, in analysing street performers it is difficult to employ traditional social, literary and cultural categories, but we need to adopt – and sometimes create – more comprehensive and truly interdisciplinary paradigms. It is essential to combine different methodologies, scales of analysis, and sources; in a nutshell, it often means reading the same texts with different eyes.
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