Violent Language in Early Fifteenth-century Italy: the Emotions of Invectives

Early modern Italian audiences were accustomed to hearing and exchanging insults publicly. Italian public and semi-public spaces echoed with these violent communications targeting another individual, group, or institution. Negative language had the potential to cause social strife and was for this reason often controlled and users punished. Latin scholars of early Quattrocento Italy exchanged highly codified and literary invectives. A large corpus of this literary vilification exists and yet it has attracted very little attention from Renaissance scholars. This article investigates the effect and affect of humanist invectives in early fifteenth-century Italy and reveals the performative and social nature of its highly codified production