Chapter 12 Le scritture esposte e il latino in Italia fra XIV e XV secolo

Sitting between Classical, Renaissance and Neoclassic forms and style, medieval and Early Modern epigraphy constitutes in the common perception a kind of deviation from established norms, whereby Roman epigraphic style and Latin were bent and adjusted to suit a production which was addressed to a public for which Latin was the only ‘writable’ language and yet which could not effectively either write or understand it properly. Consequently, the elaboration of a commonly shared canon for its production was probably impossible, and indeed was never attempted—either in relation to the script(s) to be used or indeed to the language(s) employed. Public script bears a particularly stringent relationship with the community for which it is produced, and it therefore yields important information about its linguistic culture. The paper will present new research on inscriptions produced in Italy in which Latin and modern vernaculars coexist and intertwine in a new symbiosis in which neither seems entirely independent of the other. The materials are drawn from a new database of vernacular inscriptions produced in Italy and reveal a hitherto uncharted picture of linguistic culture and of the role the Latin model had played in relation to modern languages before the Renaissance canon became predominant.