The book contains twelve essays, ten written in Italian, with some having been discussed in an international workshop held in Toronto on 23–25 March 2011 (“Verba Domini: The Church and Vernacular Italian before the Council of Trent”) and others specifically requested for this volume. The topics are extremely varied, and sometimes philological and erudite, involving prose and poetry in a wide chronological span from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, and ranging from Jacopone da Todi, Domenico Cavalca, and Saint Catherine of Siena to the Giardino d’orazione, Girolamo Benivieni, and even the Academy of Crusca and the place-names dedicated to saints in Italy. Beyond the quality of some of these papers — Vittorio Coletti’s “L’italiano e il modello omiletico di due predicatori a confronto: San Bernardino e Girolamo Savonarola” is particularly excellent — it is difficult to understand the historical problem that is being addressed here, which Franco Pierno’s brief introduction doesn’t help us to understand convincingly. The period “before the Council of Trent” evoked in the title seems to suggest that the essays would be focused mainly on the decisive decades from the end of the fifteenth century to the 1540s, when discussions of language and the success of Bembian classicism were intertwined all over Italy with the diffusion of the printed book and the spread of Protestant doctrines both from the pulpit and in religious texts. In 1544, for instance, the Dominican Ambrogio Catarino Politi, on the front lines in the polemic against the Lutherans, complained of having to cope with the “annoying” task of writing “in this vernacular,” since “everybody, of any social condition, men and women, ignorant and literate, wants to understand the most complex issues of theology and divine Scripture” (Compendio d’errori et inganni luterani contenuti in un libretto senza nome de l’autore, intitolato Trattato utilissimo del benefitio di Christo crucifisso [1544], 2r, 3v).
During these decades defenders of Catholic orthodoxy faced new challenges in fighting against heresy and the diffusion of the Bible in the vernacular, in promoting new models of popular devotion, in trying to reform the clergy, and in teaching children the basic creed. But none of these topics appears in the book, whose interior partitions — “Between Orality and Writing,” “Devotional Texts,” “Between Literature and Religion,” and “Linguistic Heritages” — appear somewhat extrinsic. The historical problem posed by Carlo Dionisotti in a memorable essay of 1963 — namely, the surprising link “between evangelism and Italian reformism on the one hand and the new language and vernacular literature on the other” (“La letteratura italiana nell’età del concilio di Trento,” in Geografia e storia della letteratura italiana [1967], 187), and approached from different angles by many subsequent studies — is completely absent from the book. It is, therefore, difficult to understand the “more complex view than has hitherto been observed” that should emerge from the essays, as stated in the introduction, where one reads that “religious communication from the period appears extremely variegated, without apparent common denominators”; nor does one find that these essays “provide a systematic vision of pre-Tridentine religious language” (2–3). In fact, it is the concept of “pre-Tridentine religious language” that makes it difficult to precisely comprehend Jacopone da Todi and Battista da Crema, Domenico Cavalca and Bernardino Ochino, and what they wrote in very different periods and contexts.
