From Italy to Europe: Seventeenth Century Collections of Orationes Fictae

In the seventeenth century there was a renewed interest in Italy in orationes fictae, just when historiography, the genre that had first embraced them, began to repudiate them in favour of a more scientific method. Naturally, orationes fictae in the sense of autonomous exercises rather than as enhancing parts of other literary genres continued to be given ample room in schools and academies, and the Jesuits reassessed them for their teaching programmes. This chapter reviews this microgenre of collections of speeches, which was started in Italian by Giovanni Battista Manzini and Giovan Francesco Loredan before spreading throughout Europe (Ferrante Pallavicino, Antonio Lupis, Vincenzo Pasqualigo, Giuseppe Battista, Georges de Scudéry, Félix de Lucio Espinosa y Malo, José Penso de la Vega, Mariano Nipho) . We shall analyze the works with particular reference to structure, types of speakers, and their audiences.