Abstract
Reviewed by: Andrea Yaakov Lattes, Independent Scholar, Israel
Simone Testa’s book is the result of a project developed at the Royal Holloway University of London in collaboration with the British Library, called IAD-Italian Academies Database. This project deals with the creation of a database to contain information of the various academies founded in Italy between 1525 and 1700, and their many activities. These data included: academies’ members’ names, events and dates, the cities where academies were active, list of published texts as well as translated books, names of translator and printer, sponsors to whom the books are dedicated or offered, places of printing, many authors which had collaborate, as well as speeches held at the various assemblies.
In fact, since the end of Middle Ages, and for almost four centuries, the custom of gathering to found cultural academies has spread, mainly in Italy but also in the rest of Europe. At its peak, during the 17th–18th Centuries, over 500 different academies were active throughout Italy. Although sometimes these organizations were formed by scattered clusters of curious scholars, dealing with somewhat extravagant arguments, often meetings focused on topics such as natural science, music, or poetry. Indeed, their purpose was to study, but at the same time they also wished to entertain and spend time, considering that the alternative was just to pass time in a tavern and gambling. For example, at the end of Seventeenth Century a small group of young, rowdy people gathered in Florence to deal with futile things, to joke together and to gossip. Considering flour was their main food while they were engaged with secondary things, they proclaimed themselves as “Accademia della Crusca,” (Academy of Bran), which is still the most important academy dealing with Italian language today. It should be pointed out that most of Baroque culture and science developed within these academies, such as the opera or the custom of drinking coffee together. Famous people such as Galileo Galilei, Francesco Redi (the founder of experimental biology), Federico Cesi (the founder of the Lincei Academy) were all academic. But even a century earlier, Michelangelo Buonarroti was elected “father and master” of the Academy of Drawings (Accademia del Disegno) in Florence which was founded by Grand Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici in 1563. These organizations were centers of cultural interaction, in which oral lectures and speeches, as well as theatrical performances and operas, interacted with written forms of culture as these organizations also encouraged and sponsored printing of books, such as lexicons and biographical dictionaries, manuals and collections of poems and speeches. Furthermore this kind of circulation occurred not only between one city and another, but also between different countries.
A common practice of the academies was to compile very detailed statutes, and to keep records containing the protocols of their activities as well as the list of its members or of its protectors and sponsors. These names lists appear on other occasions too, such as in printed books and manuscript texts. The purpose of this custom was probably to enhance their academy membership, by extolling them and leaving a memory of those who benefited the community. For this reason, Testa defines these activities as a Facebook precedent: “In the age of social and intellectual networks, and especially in the age of Facebook, I believe that I am not too far off the mark if I see Italian academies as their antecedents” (p. 126).
Collecting this data and through the use of computers, it is therefore possible to link different information in order to reconstruct the various social and cultural networks, and from these lists of names it is possible, according to Testa, to carry out a prosopographic analysis of these people in order to highlight the composition of the cultural environments formed in one given city. For example, by clicking a name on the computer, it is possible to trace back the various activities of that person, their belonging to multiples academies, or being an author of diverse volumes, and so by clicking the title of a book, you can get data on the different authors, translators, printers, as well as information about those to whom the book is dedicated. Through the use of these data, it is finally possible to reconstruct the various networks between different organizations, between many scholars and different cities, and hence the movements of persons belonging to one of these institutions, and consequently also the transfer of ideas, and the directives of cultural influences from one place to another.
Since this book’s purpose is to show and discover the various social and cultural networks developed around the academies, the author analyzes this phenomenon describing many examples. The result is an interesting revelation of the social context and the atmosphere in which academies operated. The findings show finally that the dissemination of academies across the peninsula was probably an expression of a particular intellectual movement, a consequence of a wretched society, which became one of the most important phenomena of the early modern period. Although this phenomenon developed in Italy, it was later taken as a cultural model and imitated throughout Europe inspiring the so-called “Republic of Letters.”
This book opens new perspectives for study and research on the phenomenon of Italian association movement during the early modern age. An interesting first question concerns the political character of the academies, i.e. how far these institutions were connected with ruling classes, or were rather alternative, if not subversive organizations. In fact, the academies were always not part of the cultural mainstream, but alternative institutions to those already established such as universities. Furthermore, this study contributes to the understanding of social stratification within academies, namely the role of women and of young people. In fact, on one hand, it confirms that academies were often aristocratic circles or at least benevolent, but on the other hand, young people usually played an active role in the founding of these institutions.
Another result of this research, which is until now was not sufficiently analyzed by scholars, concerns the use of leisure time during ancien regime societies. This feature is one of the most important elements of the so-called zeitgeist, the spirit of time, that is, the mentality, culture and customs that spread in an era. In fact, leisure is the result of life rhythms as well as of its time subdivision, and reflects the complexity of stimuli that society can offer. It is thus obvious, as Testa writes in the introduction, that “confraternities represent a privileged way to observe the culture of social life” (p. 3). It is likely that one of the causes for spreading this associative phenomenon was connect with urbanization and the relative need for socialization, which led not only to the foundation of academies but also to confraternities. In fact, it is superfluous to point out that social networks are not a modern invention, both for leisure and cultural exchanges, but indeed have probably existed from the very beginning of mankind, being social excellence. Human contacts and exchanges of information are a founding element of society, as well as the creation of contact networks, and what changes are of course the methodologies.