Out Loud: Practices of Reading and Reciting in Early Modern Times

This special issue intends to map the insidious territory of orality in the early modern era, a period in which, in Italy and Britain alike, the ‘literature read aloud’ dealt with the epoch-making invention of printing and was assailed more than ever by concurrent and competing traditions and procedures of fruition of literary texts: silent reading of books, the general increase of literacy, the (re-)explosion of theatre as a secular, open form of entertainment. And yet, all these phenomena, which might seem to discourage and make sadly obsolete the custom of reading aloud, in the end reveal themselves to be peculiar, but effective bed-fellows of this very custom. The present volume includes a wide-ranging Introduction, six case studies spanning four centuries, from the fifteenth to the late eighteenth, and a rich documentary Appendix, and its main, collective and final result is precisely the demonstration of the interferences, reciprocal influences, and productive reactions that took place between the persistent, resilient habit of ‘reading aloud’ and the other means of getting acquainted with a verbal text.