Erotic Jest and Gesture in Roman Anthologies of Neapolitan Dialect Songs

Abstract

This study calls attention to the vital role that the villanesca played in the erotic comic culture of the Cinquecento. Neapolitan songwriters, influenced by the equivocal language of burlesque poets, appropriated their copious lexicon of sexual euphemisms to raise laughter through erotic jesting. Given the considerable amount of semiotic and linguistic research devoted to literary erotica in the past decades, the villanesca can now be fully served by new interpretative approaches and theories of reception that address the production of multiple meanings. Erotic humour worked effectively in Roman villanesche because the prime targets of jests are figures who occupied prominent places in Rome’s cultural identity—courtesans, clerics, and noblemen in the service of the Church. Readings of villanesche, selected from three extant Roman anthologies, demonstrate the ways in which songwriters eroticized licit and illicit sexual encounters, thereby motivating singers to clarify equivocal terms with performative gestures or vocal nuances.