Broadening the canon: the scribes of the Capitolo dei Frati (1660-1850)
Abstract. The paper focuses on the work of some of the scribes who produced the manuscripts of the Capitolo dei Frati, a satirical poem by Sebastiano Chiesa. It will demonstrate how manuscript production remained a major professional activity within monasteries and private workshops throughout the Early Modern period in Italy.
The invention and fast dissemination of print in Western Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries did not replace manuscript culture, and the profession of scribe thrived throughout Early Modern Europe. Indeed, an overwhelming number of manuscripts was produced professionally and semi-professionally from the mid-sixteenth century till the end of the nineteenth century, hinting towards a complex reality where print and manuscripts co-existed and influenced each other. Documents attest guilds of maestri di scrivere in various Italian cities which provided professionals for high-profile jobs (e.g. scrittore dei Privilegi… e delle Lettere Piombate, Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Riformagioni 44, ff. 107-108, 1651); star calligraphers like Valerio Spada (Massar 1981) produced large numbers of codices, most of them as shelf books, produced outside of any commission, and offered on the public market. However, most research on manuscripts does not extend beyond the mid-sixteenth century, when print allegedly substituted manuscripts. The paper will therefore consider scribes of this period, focusing on the case study of the Capitolo dei Frati, one of the bestsellers of the time, but which was never printed. Composed around 1650 by Sebastiano Chiesa, it circulated widely, with more than 200 surviving copies found so far dating from 1660 to 1850, and a rough estimate suggests that easily over a thousand manuscripts were produced. Preliminary work suggests that around 70% of these were the work of professional scribes, and this number testifies to the literary quality of the text but also, even more importantly, to the existence of a systematic and systemic manuscript production in the Early Modern period. The quality of writing of a large number of these manuscripts also raises questions about the training and the identities of these professionals, and how much they relied on writing manuals or on schools (scuole di scrivere, ASF, id.) to master their craft. The text has been almost completely ignored by scholars, probably because of the received idea that Early Modern manuscripts are simply subprint products (to use Hays’ 2020 terminology) and so implicitly not worthy of any attention, but the quality and quantity of those codices challenge this view. Our research has uncovered many scribes and workshops, most of which were located within monastic institutions, which were still producing manuscripts for internal consumption, but also for a wider market, competing with professional scribes. These manuscripts are characterised by the broadest range of scripts and different levels of ambition aimed at different types of publics, confirming and substantially widening the codicological typologies proposed by Nebbiai (1978). Some of them were produced within printing establishments and were sold alongside printed books, while others feature printed title pages and even printed colophons, suggesting a mass production to justify the effort of typesetting them.