Orality, Literacy, and Historiography in Neapolitan Vernacular Urban Chronicles in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries

This paper concern Neapolitan chronicles composed in vernacular by popular authors (i.e. people belonging to the urban “middle class”: notaries, artisans, town clerks, merchants) during or close after the crisis of 1495-1503, from Charles VIII’s invasion to the success of Ferdinand the Catholic, when the kingdom of Naples lost its independence. These chronicles, according to a deep analysis with the tools of textual linguistics, codicology and diplomatics, seem to be the eterogeneous and dinamic product of different narrative and documentary models: oral and written texts, the arcaic prose of the Anjou chronicles (Cronaca di Partenope) and the orality of epic compositions (cantari), the news and the rumors circulating in the city and the formulars of documents, letters, bans, minutes kept by the town government and by the “Seggio di Popolo”, the association of populars which challenged the nobles for ruling Naples. Our authors, not high cultivated people, were looking for innovative narrative patterns, mediating between the royal Court and Chancery’s “great narrative” and the lower levels of political communication. Their texts let us know the different voices of the town, the different spreading ways of the news, the effective availability of documents, which could be copied, summarised and even evocated. What is more, they reveal the complexity of the opposition orality/literacy