Circles of Interpretation and the Printing World: the Case of the Community of " Italian Exiles " in French-Speaking Countries in the Sixteenth Century
Résumé
The renewal of religious thought in fifteenth-and sixteenth-century Italy was largely determined by the peninsula's geopolitical fragmentation – a fragmentation which manifested in the emergence of multiple centres of interpretation of sacred texts, located in many different places. The spread of evangelist and the reformation theories were likewise linked, especially in the lay population, to regional variations; notably those concerning the literacy rates of the middle and lower classes, which varied according to the economic models adopted by the different regions. The presence of a literate, administrating and trading class in Italy's principal commercial and financial centres (Venice, Genoa, Siena and Florence) frequently went hand in hand with a certain degree of literacy in the lower classes; it was not uncommon, for example, to find craftsmen, artists, barber-surgeons, small shopkeepers and traders who could and did read in the vernacular. In addition, the existence of a network of studii and universities – often situated in relatively out-of-the-way towns with respect to the main religious and political centres of Italy (Padua, Bologna, Pisa) – favoured the development of written culture and reading practices centred, first, around the workshops of copyists and, later, around the first printing presses. If, in addition, we consider the massive presence of literate, regular and secular clergy in the urban milieux, and the organisation of councils in various Italian towns during the 15 th and 16 th centuries, it comes as no surprise that the reinterpretation of religious thought became at this time a major subject of interest for the middle-and, to a certain extent, lower-class urban milieux. The rural world was less affected by these phenomena, at least during the 15 th century. In southern Italy, where the latifundia and general urban rarefaction determined the acculturation of the poorest classes, new circles of interpretation do not seem to have emerged at all. However, in Calabria, Puglia (as in some regions of northwestern Italy), a number of Vaudian communities would respond, in the 16th century, to the call from transalpine reformation movements.
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