Lo schiaffo. Storia, rituali, paesaggi sonori

The texts of the Latin Middle Ages and of the early Modern Age stage the slap in two apparently opposite situations: the slap can be the culmination of violence in the humiliation of the face or else it can represent a form of ordinary everyday microviolence on the familiar face. 2. To this polarity corresponds the different types of ritual use of the slap, which we encounter in liturgies that structure society (sacred and profane), but also in wholly minor social rituals (such as sales contracts). 3. To the institutional rituals of slap correspond rituals of inversion, where the slap is made ridiculous or/and used to symbolically overturn any form of order established (in games, ecstasies and comic acts). 4. In this way the slap can be the occasion for serious social disorders. 5. The comic use of the slap tends to delegitimize its current use and the mythical image, and the connection of the slap to a soundscape accentuates its ridicule. 6.The sound of the slap in the theater corresponds to the sound of applause: the applause with the hands - which an important part of the medieval tradition considers transgressive and vulgar - imitates the slap (associating face and hand) and tends to overturn its meaning and to exclude it from social practices. Liturgical, hagiographic and historiographical and juridical sources (6th-17th centuries).