“Dishonest Words, Noises, and Extraordinary Shouting”: Mapping Sound in Early Modern Florence

Enclosed women’s institutions in early modern Florence regularly complained about the clatter, racket, and din from surrounding streets that they heard within their institutions. These noises were not only disruptive, but also dangerous as they threatened the social and bodily boundaries female enclosures sought to uphold within the city. The sounds women heard and made delineated their social identities and impacted health and purity. Sixteenth and seventeenth century Italian medical and health practices understood that sound moved through the air, entered into the body, and disrupted one’s internal state for better or for worse. Controlling sound was directly linked to controlling and regulating the body. Civic and institutional authorities therefore worked to discipline soundscapes surrounding the city’s plethora of female enclosures- and by extension to discipline those who lived, lingered, and passed through these soundscapes. The remarkable rise of Florentine female institutionalization beginning in the mid-sixteenth century brought more urgency to these efforts as the city claimed responsibility for the sonic health and honour of thousands of enclosed girls and women. Using unpublished archival records this paper examines soundscapes surrounding women’s institutions, both civic and ecclesiastical, in the early modern city, considering links between the material world of Florentine streets and bodies and the immaterial world of the senses. This gendered acoustemology of noise reveals the complex socio-sonic dynamics that patterned experience in the early modern city.