Orality and sacred music in early modern Italy

Much of orality’s cultural world in early modern Italy has been studied from the perspective of the obvious sources: inquisitorial testimony, trials, oral epic, commedia dell’arte, balladry, and social history in general. Thus its relation to the sacred – if we can even isolate a separate category of the sacred – has had a lower scholarly prole. To the degree that the kind of social disciplining, ritual reform, and preoccupation with doctrinal precision once known as the Counter-Reformation seems to have privileged print culture, its effects have often been considered as negative for verbal creativity and performance.1