‘FAITHFUL TO THE SPOKEN WORD’: SERMONS FROM ORALITY TO WRITING IN EARLY MODERN ITALY

Abstract

Many early modern Italian sermons have come down to us in the form of handwritten transcriptions or printed books. Many preachers, reportatores, or editors of sermons stress that their written texts correspond verbatim to their oral versions pronounced from the pulpit. Usually there are no specific reasons to doubt the fidelity of those texts to their originals, but this raises a more general question: to what extent can we rely on a reportatio written during the sermon or on a printed version, often revised and amended even by the preacher himself? This essay examines the passage from the spoken word of a preacher to its written version and raises some doubts about the alleged fidelity of the latter. It also seeks to explain why the perfect correspondence between the two versions was so frequently claimed even if it did not exist.