A unique new edition of the Prima Oratione (First Oration) of Renaissance playwright Angelo Beolco (Il Ruzante) has been published by Linda Carroll, professor of Italian. The edition is the first to fully transcribe all three extant versions and to provide an English translation of this short performance piece, which celebrated the new bishop of Padua, Marco Cornaro. The introduction, on the basis of extensive archival research, hypotheses two additional performances of the piece and reveals its links with the economic interests of the Venetian patricians who hosted Beolco's performances, including the Cornaro family. It also makes new connections between the piece and its author and other leading literary and theatrical figures and developments of the time.
The edition was published in London by the Modern Humanities Research Association. Carroll, a leading expert on dialects of the eastern Veneto of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, was also the translator for Venice, Cità Excelentissima: Selections from the Renaissance Diaries of Marin Sanudo, edited by Patricia H. Labalme and Laura Sanguineti White and published by The Johns Hopkins University Press in 2008. The project, which translates and contextualizes passages from these proto-journalistic diaries of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, was supported in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.