Urban voices: The hybrid figure of the street singer in Renaissance Italy

Abstract

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.