venetian language 931
matricŭlae “registers”) until the fall of the Republic, and to diplomatic
and commercial pacts and dispatches in the earlier part of our period.
Fundamental merchant manuals such as the anonymous 14th-century
Zibaldone da Canal,8 correspondence, record books, treatises, and coastal
navigation maps (portolani) employ Venetian. So too do the dozens of
14th- and 15th-century vernacular inscriptions in Venetian public spaces
of all types, unrivalled in their range and number in italy, which provide,
among other information, invaluable socio-cultural details about the lay
confraternities (sc(u)ole), great and small, in the city. the Venetian ver-
nacular gospels have their own history affiliated to the example of their
French predecessors.9 the centuries-long Venetian chronicle tradition in
the vernacular is both important and linguistically distinctive. it culmi-
nated in the indispensable 58-volume diaries of Marin Sanudo (Marino
Sanuto, 1466–1536),10 with their remarkable impasto of Venetian, tuscan,
and northern italian written norms,11 as well as in those of girolamo Priuli
(1476–1547), Domenico Malipiero (1428–1515), and Pietro Dolfin (1427–
1506).12 Without Venetian, the primary sources for the history of theater
in the Venetian state, from Ruzante to goldoni, via the stage professional-
ism of the commedia dell’arte that was seminal in the european context,
can only be studied at second hand. Key art-historical texts, including
the notes of Marcantonio Michiel (1485–1552) on contemporary art col-
lections in Venice and other northern italian centres, Lorenzo Lotto’s
account book, and Marco Boschini’s 17th-century panegyric on Venetian
painting are in venexian or partly so.13 the recently published 1000-page
manuscript thesaurus of the patrician Francesco Zorzi Muazzo,14 with-
out which an understanding of 18th-century society in the Serenissima is
incomplete, is entirely in the writer’s dense, idiomatic Venetian.
8 alfredo Stussi, ed., Zibaldone da Canal (Venice, 1967).
9 Francesca gambino, ed., I Vangeli in antico veneziano: ms Marciano it. 13 (4889)
(Rome, 2007).
10 Rinaldo Fulin, et al., eds., I diarii di Marino Sanuto, 58 vols (Venice, 1879–1902).
11 anna Laura Lepschy, “the Language of Sanudo’s Diarii,” in David Chambers, Cecil
Clough and Michael Mallett, eds., War, Culture and Society in Renaissance Venice (London,
1993), pp. 199–212.
12 Christiane neerfeld, “Historia per forma di diaria.” La cronachistica veneziana contem-
poranea a cavallo tra il Quattro e il Cinquecento (Venice, 2006).
13 See Marcantonio Michiel, Notizie d’opere del disegno, ed. theodor Frimmel (1896;
Florence, 2000); Lorenzo Lotto, Il libro di spese diverse, ed. Pietro Zampetti (Venice, 1969);
and anna Pallucchini, ed., Marco Boschini: “La carta del navegar pitoresco” (Venice, 1966).
14 Francesco Zorzi Muazzo, Raccolta de’ proverbii, detti, sentenze, parole e frasi vene-
ziane, ed. Franco Crevatin (Vicenza, 2008).