As the Priest Said to the Nun
John Gallagher: A Town that Ran on Talk, 1 June 2023
The Talk of the Town: Information and Community in 16th-Century Switzerland
by Carla Roth.
Oxford, 164 pp., £75, February 2022,978 0 19 284645 7 Show More
by Carla Roth.
Oxford, 164 pp., £75, February 2022,
“... down in broken Latin what he heard and who from. He diligently, perhaps obsessively, recorded what Carla Roth calls ‘the debris of talk in a 16th-century town’. Rütiner’s manuscripts, known as the Commentationes – a term meaning ‘studies’ or ‘treatise’ – were long dismissed by historians as a gossipy record that had none of the gravitas ... ”