The Unruly Tongue - (Middle Ages) by Melissa Vise (Hardcover)

About the Book

"When and how did pictures permeate everyday lives in the United States? What happened to those daily lives when they did? And what happened to pictures in the process? This book traces the beginnings of a transformation in cultural life in the US: when widespread circulation of pictures reshaped a culture accustomed to printed and spoken words. In the three decades before the Civil War, the ordinary experiences of a large segment of the population came to include pictures of many kinds, including illustrations in books, pamphlets, and newspapers; photographs on cards; full-sheet printed pictures collected in scrapbooks or albums or hung on walls; posters and broadsheets; spectacular paintings displayed in theatrical venues; and more. Pictures supplemented verbal texts--and in some cases overshadowed them--for conveying news and information; portraying people, places, and events; focusing public discourse; selling things; educating and instructing; generating excitement and aesthetic gratification; promoting and disguising political agendas; shaping social identities; and building and undermining social bonds. This study recovers a time before successful pictorial formulas for mass appeal were established, before an audience habituated to consumption of pictures existed, and before pictures had become thoroughly commodified. The foundations for our picture-saturated twenty-first century can be seen in the developments explored in this book"--Publisher's description.

Book Synopsis

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."

Review Quotes

"Melissa Vise clears away the fog of teleology and writes a history of the regulation of speech in the Italian communes on its own terms, with important implications for the political state of the twenty-first century. This fascinating book will be of interest not just to historians and medievalists but also to political scientists and political philosophers."-- "Daniel Lord Smail, Harvard University"

"Brimming with fresh ideas and original insights derived from impressive archival investigations, The Unruly Tongue offers a sophisticated, thoroughly researched exploration of ideas about speech in the public forum in the historical context of the later medieval Italian communes."-- "Brett E. Whalen, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill"

About the Author

Melissa Vise is Associate Professor of Medieval Mediterranean History at Washington and Lee University.