The Noisy Renaissance: Sound, Architecture, and Florentine Urban Life

摘要

Niall Atkinson's The Noisy Renaissance: Sound, Architecture, and Florentine Urban Life is an inventive and insightful addition to the recent bibliography on early modern urbanism. Though sound was an intrusive facet of the Renaissance city, historians tend to tune out the quotidian noise generated before audio recording, concentrating instead on what is communicated visually through the organisation of infrastructure, monuments and other physical appurtenances of the urban environment. In The Noisy Renaissance, Atkinson shifts his attention to the importance of aural information, arguing 'that the soundscape was a principal medium through which authorities played out major strategies of urban planning and political propaganda' (p. 71). Atkinson discusses noise generated outside the political sphere, but the brunt of the book is devoted to an examination of how sound shaped and asserted control over the lives of Florentines and their experience of the environment. Drawing on a rich corpus of literature and archival material, he evaluates early modern music, legislation, shouting, speeches, storytelling, mechanical labour, bells, clocks, poetry and other 'aural transmitters' to fill lacunae in our understanding of early modern soundscapes.