Chapter One already develops several of the book’s overarching arguments with notable clarity. Most importantly, Vise challenges the assumption that the regulation of speech in medieval Italy functioned primarily as a mechanism of repression. Instead, she argues that it often represented an effort to foster peace and harmony within the city. The chapter centers on Albertano da Brescia and Brunetto Latini, lay intellectuals emerging from the notarial milieu who wrote on rhetoric with the explicit aim of providing their communities with an ethics of speech. According to Vise, the intellectual activity of these figures should not be understood as a step toward secularization, but rather as an expression of what she terms civic theology. She identifies Albertano as the originator of this new genre and Brunetto as the thinker who successfully integrates Albertano’s insights with the Ciceronian rhetorical tradition.

This addition to the scholarly conversation is particularly exciting as it offers a fresh perspective on authors who are well known yet still capable of surprising reinterpretation. Alongside substantial recent Italian scholarship on Albertano—most notably by Enrico Artifoni—and a well-established body of work on Brunetto Latini in both Italian and English, Vise’s analysis of both authors is original and nuanced. She focuses on Brunetto’s Rettorica and Trésor, alongside two of Albertano’s three treatises, De amore et dilectione Dei et proximi et aliarum rerum et de forma vitae and Ars loquendi et tacendi. Somewhat surprisingly, Albertano’s Liber consolationis et consilii receives only passing mention, though it might have offered additional support to her argument.

Chapter Two shifts attention to medical discourse. After a very useful overview of medical education in late medieval Italian universities, Vise concentrates primarily on Taddeo Alderotti’s theory of sensation and phonation. What emerges is a conception of human beings as fundamentally receptive creatures. As Vise aptly puts it, “for Taddeo, not only are humans fully physically immersed in their environments, they are uniquely suscipienties [sic], or receptive, and therefore subject to them” (78). Alderotti’s emphasis on perception as physical matter that human beings “take up within” (78) is striking and allows Vise to conceptualize language in material terms—as a sonorous body received through hearing.

In the final chapter of Part One, Vise moves away from lay centers of cultural production to Dominican pastoral theory and practice. After grounding Italian Dominican reflections in the work of the French theologian William Peraldus, she turns to Giovanni di San Gimignano and Domenico Cavalca’s treatments of the peccata linguae. The pervasive use of medical and legal language in Dominican treatises and exempla reveals both an attempt to address new communities of readers and the interdisciplinary nature of medieval theorizing about speech. Although Cavalca harshly criticizes the revival of Ciceronian rhetoric embodied by Albertano, Brunetto, and other civic theologians discussed in Chapter One, Vise convincingly demonstrates that rhetoricians, medical scholars, and Dominican confessors share more common ground than their polemics suggest. All participate in emerging conversations about the physical power of language, and all seek—albeit through different means—to guide the citizens of communal Italy by norming speech.

Chapter Four presents the results of Vise’s impressive archival research, focusing on civic and religious trials concerning injurious speech (verba iniuriosa) and blasphemy. Blasphemy emerges as both a civic crime and a religious sin, subject to the jurisdiction of secular courts and inquisitors alike. Vise persuasively argues that this overlap should not be interpreted as institutional rivalry, but rather as a form of collaboration aimed at protecting the city by punishing those who activated the violent potential of words.

Like the previous chapter, Chapter Five draws extensively on archival material. Its central observation is simple yet illuminating: in Bolognese trial records concerning injurious speech, blasphemy, and magic, notaries increasingly shift from Latin to the vernacular when reporting the words under accusation. With the aid of clear and effective visualizations, Vise shows that between 1300 and 1370 notaries increasingly favored the vernacular, and that after 1370 they almost exclusively quoted verbal offenses in the original vernacular. This pattern does not apply to other crimes—such as treason, conspiracy, heresy, or perjury (173)—a distinction that underscores the importance of the material, bodily nature of violent speech.

From these findings—already compelling in their own right—Vise attempts to draw broader conclusions about the questione della lingua, suggesting that “the question of the vernacular […] found its origin not only in Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia in 1305 but also in contemporaneous documentary practice and in the most banal of linguistic constructions: the insult” (167). While this claim is intriguing, it risks overextension. One might suspect that the pressure to produce a “groundbreaking” intervention leads Vise to push beyond what her evidence suggests. In fact, the chapter stands as a powerful testament to the value of rigorous, methodologically sound archival work—work that does not need sensational conclusions to earn the admiration and gratitude of the scholarly community.

The final chapter examines violent language and blasphemy in Dante’s Inferno and Boccaccio’s Decameron. This literary turn is an expected and fitting conclusion to a systematic study of speech and violence in Trecento Italy. Specialists in Dante and Boccaccio will not encounter radically new interpretations, but the chapter effectively situates these canonical texts within the dense web of medical, legal, and pastoral reflections on language discussed in the previous chapters. This context might explain why Vise relies more heavily on close reading than on the extensive secondary scholarship available on these topics.

By weaving together multiple disciplines and methodological approaches, The Unruly Tongue offers a deeply rewarding reading experience. It invites scholars to step outside disciplinary boundaries and reconsider language from a broader perspective, demonstrating that late medieval concerns about the power of words were more pervasive and interconnected than is often assumed. Notaries, physicians, poets, and theologians emerge as participants in shared conversations about speech, harm, and communal life. Written in a clear and engaging style, Vise’s book immerses its readers in Trecento Italy—a world in which words were understood to possess the physical power to wound individuals and, just as importantly, to heal communities. Highly recommended.

Paolo Scartoni, Washington University in St. Louis