I forzati della penna. Girolamo Brusoni, un professionista delle lettere nel Seicento italiano

«My profession is to write histories and send them for print». The statement, concise and catchy, was pronounced by Girolamo Brusoni during a case prepared by the Riformatori dello Studio di Padova, in 1664. This is the focus: what did it mean to be a "professional of the letters” in the full 17th century, in Italy, and what were the features of writing histories? The singularity of the biographical pattern can illuminate the complex world of those who lived (or survived) through writing in the 17th century. Girolamo Brusoni performed in the theatrum mundi as friar, scholar, translator, academic, novelist, secret informer, historiographer. In the literary corpus, wide and assorted (novels, romances, academic memoires, poems, translations, treatises, reports and histories), he poured biographical fragments and self projections, but above all he captured the inner turmoil of facts and cities, from the Polesine, to Ferrara and Padua, then to Venice and the riviera del Brenta, up to Turin. The world was changing: Brusoni belonged to a generation in identity crisis, marked by plague, upset by wars and involved in political plots, negotiations and power relations, in both national and european perspectives. The “professionals of the letters” struggled to conquer a social status and a recognized position and the variety of social actors guaranteed a continuous process of increase and exchange: all authors, editors, typographers, booksellers, agents and informers offered different competences, daily increasing the editorial market and the commerce of informations. These figures (Brusoni included) have been sometimes confused, carelessly judged and frequently dismissed as “adventurers of the pen” or unreliable “hack writers”, but their condition still deserves to be explored. The research examines several recurring subjects, which followed the social and cultural transformations and persistently reappeared in individual and collective events. The concept of «freedom», for example, was inflected in various forms, from «freedom of the spirit», to «freedom of the pen», up to the “libertinisms” and the claim for liberating naturalistic inclinations. The academic experience, ruled by the practice of conversation and pervaded by the shades of venetian non conformism and libertinism, was absorbed by the novels. Moreover, since the debut, the author showed a strong interest in chronicles and historical narration. The “rhetoric of truth”, regularly performed in the defense of the writing method used for the reports and the histories, appeared over and over again in every book in the “notices to the readers”. The correspondence showed the exhausting negotiations for the representation of power and the dissemination of the public image, besides the problem of honor, reputation and authorial respectability. At the time, the power relations between social actors ruled the literary production, particularly the historical, and affected the writers’ margin of freedom: these dynamics involved the authors, the political power and the public. In a society so conditioned by the stream of news and by the desire to fabricate opinions and to discuss publicly the informations, the rulers needed to manipulate the narrations and the informative materials. In the full 17th century, all these matters played an essential role in the construction of the social identity of individuals, as Girolamo Brusoni, and defined their professional awareness. The “professionals of the letters” observed, listened, read, collected, organized news and informations, kept huge correspondences and, most of all, they wrote a lot, trying to ensure some political protection and to catch the taste of a wide and demanding public.