1 Chapter 11 the PUBLIC SPHERE and the ORGANIZATION of KNOWLEDGE Brendan Dooley Introduction

Chapter 11 THE PUBLIC SPHERE AND THE ORGANIZATION OF KNOWLEDGE Brendan Dooley Introduction: the marketplace of ideas ‘The kittens have opened their eyes’. 1 So proclaimed Lionardo Fioravanti in 1576, commenting on the distribution of knowledge about nature to wider and wider audiences. No longer, in his view, could the specialists count on popular ignorance for guaranteeing their prestige. And his statement about the effects of the printing press, Costantino Saccardino applied practically word for word, some forty years later, to knowledge about religion. Around the same time that Saccardino was burned for heresy in Bologna, Traiano Boccalini in Rome remarked about the large number of curious minds to which politics was now being exposed. When Ferrante Pallavicino finally added the field of sexual experience to this growing list, no one could deny that a significant change was under way. What was to be this brave new world, in which the secret nostrums and enchantments of the philosophers would be put to everyday use? What would happen if the true nature of religion were revealed, and the techniques used by rulers for gaining and losing states made objects for conversation by the many? What were the risks, if new knowledge of the body were to put the deepest sources of pleasure, so to speak, at the fingertips of all? Political and religious authorities thought they knew. Discipline would slacken. Obedience would disappear. And the tradition-honoured distinctions between categories of people would be erased. In short, a world of lewdness, licence and libertinism would replace the more ordered one in which they lived. 1 Almost no one, before the eighteenth century, argued that information of all sorts ought to circulate with total freedom. But between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries a developing market for information and knowledge overwhelmed all efforts to hold it back. Few were the ideas, originating in high culture and tending toward the modification or destruction of traditional thought patterns, that did not find their way into academic discussions or even, on occasion, university lesson plans; and few were the popular commonplaces of rebellion that did not find an eventual outlet in the printed word-openly or clandestinely. The wider marketplace of ideas appeared to have enormous consequences for the organization of power. Discussion and debate of issues whose control had previously defined the very categories of authority now took place in a public sphere, potentially open to anyone who wished to take part. From the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, the emergence of this public sphere was itself an object of debate. And one of the great contributions of the Italian Enlightenment philosophers was to recognize a fait accompli—the new organization of knowledge—and to form programs for social renewal based on what they perceived as a newly instituted power. Recent research has drawn attention to the precocity of Italy’s contribution to this leading European trend. New sources and new methods have helped distinguish the new emerging world from the old disappearing one, during the period covered by this book. This chapter can only trace the bare outlines of a theme that regarded literary history as much as political history, the history of science as well as the history of knowledge, the history of aesthetics as well as the history of conversation. None of this, of course, is to imply that the mechanisms for the repression of knowledge were not everywhere present or, where present, were ineffective. And 2 discussions about the necessity for censorship and other controls among ecclesiastical authorities were exactly matched by discussions among civil ones. They need no further elaboration here. However, in the minds of the authorities involved, the difficulties of successfully repressing dangerous ideas seemed to be somehow offset by the advantages of encouraging possibly useful cultural expressions in the academies, in the universities, and, especially, in the press. To be sure, the cultivation of favourable expressions in the arts and humanities was nothing new. In the new environment that began to emerge in the early modern period, efforts to direct expressions to the interests of Church and state encountered powerful competition in what was becoming a veritable marketplace of ideas. Print culture Already in the sixteenth century, presses were at work in over a hundred centres, from Venice to Palermo, and from Cagliari in Sardinia to Eboli in the kingdom of Naples. Books are difficult to count, and for the two following centuries no complete catalogue yet exists. The information we have indicates a remarkable increase across the period. The early eighteenth-century Venetian printer Girolamo Albrizzi could be excused for the exaggeration, when he remarked, ‘more books are born today every year than previously in an entire century’. 2 He well knew that judging their quality was no easy task. Half a century later, the Modena-based scholar and journalist Francesco Antonio Zaccaria quipped, ‘If the good Lord does not send down some paper-eating pestilence to get so many bad and useless writings out of the way, we will pretty soon have to abandon our 3 homes to give way to these honoured guests, whose indiscretion becomes more odious as their number increases’. 3 A major change between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries was the emergence of new instruments intended to convey larger quantities of information to larger numbers of readers. Smaller formats could make printing less expensive, and text from a quarto edition could be squeezed into a duodecimo with considerable savings in paper—still a precious commodity in the age before wood pulp. No one knew this better than Antonio Bulifon, printer in Naples, whose experiments earned him the epithet, ‘inventor of the duodecimo’. A small pamphlet could even be condensed into a single handbill. And by the seventeenth century, even scientists such as Gian Domenico Cassini and Marcello Malpighi either had such handbills printed up containing works of theirs, or else considered doing so. Indeed, so widespread did the literature in flysheet, pamphlet, duodecimo, ventiquattresimo, and so on, become, that Giovanni Cinelli Calvoli devised a special tool called the Biblioteca volante (‘the flying library’) in order to keep track of it. To the many new genres of publication introduced in the first years of printing, the seventeenth century added printed newspapers. Political information that once circulated in manuscript newsletters, commercial correspondence and diplomatic reports could now be put at the disposal of many. First introduced in Italy by the Genoese writer Pietro Castelli in 1639, on the model of Theophraste Renaudot’s Gazette de France , and spurred on by the events of the Thirty Years War, newspapers were an instant success. They soon spread to Florence, and eventually they appeared in Venice, Rimini, Mantua, Milan, Ancona, Foligno, Turin, Bologna, Macerata, Messina, Naples, Perugia, Fermo, Sinigaglia and Fano (to name the centres so far identified). By the end of the century, they were a 4 thriving industry. In the cities of the papal states, monopolies on certain kinds of news went for twenty to thirty scudi apiece, when the entire value of a print shop rarely exceeded 150 scudi. In Florence, the state monopoly was bid up from 400 ducats a year to 425. In Naples, where a numerous population made for brisk business, the monopoly cost no less than 800 ducats. Of course, print was no greater guarantee for the accuracy of this information at the time than it is in our own. The government pensions awarded to some journalists, for instance in the duchy of Savoy, to ensure the production of favourable news, did little to increase credibility; in fact, quite the opposite. Lorenzo Magalotti, naturalist and secretary of the Accademia del Cimento in Florence, found news writing to be a source of despair so painful that he included it along with the other causes of philosophical scepticism. But in order for information to become a subject of discussion, it was not necessary to believe the sensationalist stories invented by subscription-hungry journalists or the news about far-fetched achievements planted by publicity-seeking governments. The bad faith of the people who made them up became itself a subject of discussion in the public sphere. Noted the Milanese adventurer Gregorio Leti, ‘Everyone knows that very frequently princes turn losses into victories in order terrify the people; and, indeed, to bring them into ever greater affection. Therefore, the people, so frequently hoodwinked, always turn victories into losses, forming squadrons at their pleasure and princes to their tastes’. 4 The variety magazine, another seventeenth-century invention, increased still more the scope for the regular publication of quantities of information. The new genre emerged directly from earlier media for exchanging cultural news, like book catalogues and 5 handbills, as well as manuscript letters, still valid conduits between scholars and amateurs alike. From these occasional media to the regular weekly or monthly emission, with a promise of indefinite continuation, of volumes concerning every aspect of cultural activity interesting to amateurs and specialists alike, was not a very great step, and the first to take it was Denis de Sallo in his Paris Journal des sçavans , published from 1665. Soon afterwards came the Roman Giornale dei letterati directed by the mathematician Michelangelo Ricci and collaborators. Ricci’s publication was so successful that a pirate version was started up by a printer in Bologna, and it was soon imitated in Ferrara, Parma and elsewhere. Nor, in spite of the term ‘letterati’ or ‘learned’ included many of the titles, were the new periodicals entirely aimed at a single audience. Giuseppe Malatesta Garuffi explicitly addressed his variety magazine, Il genio dei letterati appagato [‘The Satisfaction of the Inclinations of the Learned’) to ‘whoever, being rather uncultivated, [desires] to throw off [his] own rusticity [ ruvidezza ]’.

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