Civilitas e taciturnitas (2020/2021)

Learning outcomes

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The great consideration in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of the Civil conversazione, to use the title of a successful book by Stefano Guazzo, is increasingly educated and trained in silence and secret in the Spanish culture. It coexists and feeds literary genres very different from each other, from the silent eloquence of the emblematic to the political treatises, from the figure of the secretary to that of the melancholy. The theme of silence and the regulated use of language is central to the art of good governance by the prince and the survival of the courtier or secretary in the labyrinthine world of the court. And yet more and more during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the discipline of silence and the custodia oris become a founding and essential instance of the life of all men, of man in general, of cum versari.

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