Stimmversagen, Sprachinfarkt und Zungenbremse? Posttridentinische Betrachtungsliteratur Italiens zwischen orazione mentale und orazione vocale

Abstract

In the following, the literary potential of a counterreformation-minded uncertainty will be in focus which in turn resulted from the distinction in orazione orale and orazione mentale made in the context of the Council of Trent. The differentiation of inner-mental and external-vocal voice as well as one’s own word and the prescribed or appropriated word was accelerated by the Council and lead to a self-reflection of prayer literature and meditations concerning their voice and voicing. Whose voice speaks in prayers and contemplation and by which aesthetic qualities are they characterized? The literary crystallisation of standardization, domestication but also the emancipating obstinacy of the meditation-voice ought to be made visible hereafter in an exemplary way. Promoted by the Council of Trent, the revaluation of the spiritual ‘inner’ prayer, in comparison to the textual prayer spoken with an external voice, has become effective in the Catholic counterreformation literature as creative-conceptual freedom, but also as a practical-aesthetic challenge. Literary and lyrical meditations – as will be shown here using the example of Antonio Grillo, Gabriele Fiamma and Loreto Mattei – not only implement the spiritual voice of contemplation discursively and thematically, but also textually and performatively. The specific relationship between production aesthetics (meditating lyrical self) and reception aesthetics (meditating contemplative poetry appropriating self) has a supporting function. Conflicting voice-discourses do not become effective in the sense of reciprocal prevention, but in the sense of symbiotic coexistence. The lyrical considerations analysed here do not solve the interferences of vocal regimes conceptually-fundamentally, but performatively-concretely.