From Orality to Print: Revolution or Transition? Street Singers in the Renaissance Multi-Media System

The long-prevailing idea of the printing revolution as an “agent of change” modernizing western society has been exploded by recent historiography. Standing as an ‘antidote’ both to the revolutionary and to the teleological approach to that issue, the contention of the present essay is that the category of transition has heuristic value in analyzing the bridging period between the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century. The case study I am presenting applies the fruits of this historiographic revision to a chapter in the history of communication. Street-singers or piazza performers have been marginal figures neglected by historians; however, they are central to the field of Renaissance communications and prove to be a prime illustration of how the shift from orality to print bore the hallmarks of a transition instead of a revolution – continuity co-existing with change, resistance coupled with innovation.