Preliminary Programme

This paper elaborates on the experience of working on a case study in the history of communication - with a focus on seventeenth century Venice - in order to outline some of the general promises and difficulties associated with such a work. The notion of communication affords some distinctive advantages. Firs of all, ‘communication’ brings the historian's attention to the practical human experience of communicating (as opposed to, say, the notion of information, which was the object of communication). ‘Communication’ also helps us keep track of a greater variety of means and settings for the exchange of information. Finally, the emphasis on communication interestingly alters the way in which we read texts, including well-known ones. However, the study of communication also presents some distinctive and important problems to do with anachronism, teleology, and idealisation, and historians have to address them head on. (Show less)

In a historical view rhetoric has been looked at as if every agent in public discourse has the same right to speak, only he follows the rules. From a gender point of view this of course has not always been the case. In this paper I will raise the question of how a person could make a strong case, when she more or less from the start was questioned as rhetorical agent. I will discuss this problem from a methodological angle:

What kind of sources can we find in the archives to investigate the rhetorical activities of women speakers?

What kind of rhetorical strategies did women choose and do we have to alter rhetorical criticism when analysing women’s rhetoric?

Do the documents allow us any judgement about the oral performance of the speaker and the reaction of the audience?

The focus of my paper is on the 19th century and women’s rhetorical agency in different popular movements in Sweden. (Show less)

Focussing on oral means for creating publicity, this paper will argue that oral communication in developed early modern societies can only be studied succesfully if the intermediality of the oral spheres is taken into account. Using notions and insights from communication studies (the notion of the informal public sphere, the two-step-flow principle, spirals of silence and insights on the rhetorical structure of individual opinions), I would like to propose an approach which links orality to visual, theatrical, and literary culture. Such an approach should also help to deal with the obvious problem of historical studies of orality: the ephemerality of the spoken word, and the fact that we can only access the oral modes through written/printed documents and literary, musical, and visual representations. (Show less)

Proposal for the session “Oral communication in history: problems and methodology”, ESSHC 2010
In this paper I will discuss the possibilities and limitations of working with eighteenth-century material on ‘orality’. There is a great deal of literature available on reading publics and mass audiences, with due attention paid to media ranging from print to television. But little historical research has been done on ‘diffuse’ audiences or oral networks, and ‘simple audiences’, defined as ‘spatially localised audiences’, i.e. publics who experienced at first hand the oratory of speakers. For the eighteenth-century only theatre audiences have really been studied as publics in this way. In my paper I will provide an overview of the state of the art and discuss, in particular, the theoretical issues and methodological problems involved in doing research into oral communication in this period. (Show less)