Early Modern Lyric Communities and Print Culture

This essay explores a feature of the sixteenth-century Italian lyric tradition that has not been studied in the detail it deserves: the ongoing “social turn” of the later decades of the century. Social poetry, in a broad sense (verse that thematizes social relationships, exchanges, and events) came to occupy an ever-greater space within verse collections of the period, and paratexts developed to facilitate an informed social reading, such as the rich contextualizing indexes (tavole) common in late-Cinquecento volumes. The essay argues that “social volumes” of this kind construct and stage a particular type of lyric community, crafted through practices of honorific naming and praise. Like real-world communities, such textual communities policed their boundaries and distinguished between in-groups and out-groups. A diachronic and geo-culturally sensitive consideration of such inclusions and exclusions has much to tell us about the intricate social-literary landscape of Italy as it evolved between Renaissance and Baroque.