Biography

Camilla Russo specializes in Italian philology and literature. Her research focuses primarily on the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, with particular attention to Florentine civic rhetoric, literary forgeries, and lyric production in northern Italy. She earned her PhD from the University of Trento, where she held several post-doctoral positions and currently teaches Italian philology and literature. She has also held a fellowship at the Herzog August Bibliothek (Wolfenbüttel). She is the author of the monograph Firenze Nuova Roma. Arte retorica e impegno civile nelle miscellanee di prose del primo Rinascimento (Cesati, 2019).

Project Summary

Beginning with Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae, a true archetype of prison literature in the Western world, writing in captivity is a phenomenon that runs across the entire history of Italian literature, from Marco Polo to Antonio Gramsci. In prison, before the codex was definitively supplanted by the printed book, inmates also wrote on commission, producing literary texts, executing vernacularizations and translations, or more often copying manuscripts for payment. Far from being a marginal practice, prison writing played an active role in the circulation and transmission of texts. A particularly noteworthy case is that of the Stinche, the Florentine prison, where between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries a number of scribes were active, copying for remuneration works of the tre corone, alongside some of the vernacular texts most widely circulated in humanist circles. The full extent and concrete workings of this sort of scriptorium, which maintained close ties with the city’s book trade networks and its external patronage circuits, remain largely unexplored. Through an interdisciplinary approach combining philological-literary analysis and archival research, this project aims to initiate an inquiry into prison writing between the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, taking the case of Florence as its starting point, with the goal of reconstructing its dynamics, socio-cultural context, and place within the urban book market.