The Unruly Tongue

A cultural history of speech in medieval Italy The Unruly Tongue , a cultural history of speech in medieval Italy, offers a new account of how the power of words changed in Western thought. Despite the association of freedom of speech with the political revolutions of the eighteenth century that ushered in the era of modern democracies, historian Melissa Vise locates the history of the repression of speech not in Europe’s monarchies but rather in Italy’s republics. Exploring the cultural process