A Companion to Venetian History, 1400-1797

A Companion to Venetian History, 1400-1797
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 992
Release: 2013-07-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004252525

The field of Venetian studies has experienced a significant expansion in recent years, and the Companion to Venetian History, 1400-1797 provides a single volume overview of the most recent developments. It is organized thematically and covers a range of topics including political culture, economy, religion, gender, art, literature, music, and the environment. Each chapter provides a broad but comprehensive historical and historiographical overview of the current state and future directions of research. The Companion to Venetian History, 1400-1797 represents a new point of reference for the next generation of students of early modern Venetian studies, as well as more broadly for scholars working on all aspects of the early modern world. Contributors are Alfredo Viggiano, Benjamin Arbel, Michael Knapton, Claudio Povolo, Luciano Pezzolo, Anna Bellavitis, Anne Schutte, Guido Ruggiero, Benjamin Ravid, Silvana Seidel Menchi, Cecilia Cristellon, David D’Andrea, Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan, Wolfgang Wolters, Dulcia Meijers, Massimo Favilla, Ruggero Rugolo, Deborah Howard, Linda Carroll, Jonathan Glixon, Paul Grendler, Edward Muir, William Eamon, Edoardo Demo, Margaret King, Mario Infelise, Margaret Rosenthal and Ronnie Ferguson.

The Venetian Bride

The Venetian Bride
Author: Patricia Fortini Brown
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2021-03-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0192647350

A true story of vendetta and intrigue, triumph and tragedy, exile and repatriation, this book recounts the interwoven microhistories of Count Girolamo Della Torre, a feudal lord with a castle and other properties in the Friuli, and Giulia Bembo, grand-niece of Cardinal Pietro Bembo and daughter of Gian Matteo Bembo, a powerful Venetian senator with a distinguished career in service to the Venetian Republic. Their marriage in the mid-sixteenth century might be regarded as emblematic of the Venetian experience, with the metropole at the center of a fragmented empire: a Terraferma nobleman and the daughter of a Venetian senator, who raised their family in far off Crete in the stato da mar, in Venice itself, and in the Friuli and the Veneto in the stato da terra. The fortunes and misfortunes of the nine surviving Della Torre children and their descendants, tracked through the end of the Republic in 1797, are likewise emblematic of a change in feudal culture from clan solidarity to individualism and intrafamily strife, and ultimately, redemption. Despite the efforts by both the Della Torre and the Bembo families to preserve the patrimony through a succession of male heirs, the last survivor in the paternal bloodline of each was a daughter. This epic tale highlights the role of women in creating family networks and opens a precious window into a contentious period in which Venetian republican values clash with the deeply rooted feudal traditions of honor and blood feuds of the mainland.

Popular Politics in an Aristocratic Republic

Popular Politics in an Aristocratic Republic
Author: Maartje van Gelder
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2020-05-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000057860

Popular Politics in an Aristocratic Republic explores the different aspects of political actions and experiences in late medieval and early modern Venice. The book challenges the idea that the city of Venice knew no political conflict and social contestation during the medieval and early modern periods. By examining popular politics in Venice as a range of acts of contestation and of constructive popular political participation, it contributes to the broader debate about premodern politics. The volume begins in the late fourteenth century, when the demographical and social changes resulting from the Black Death facilitated popular challenges to the ruling class’s power, and finishes in the late eighteenth century, when the French invasion brought an end to the Venetian Republic. It innovates Venetian studies by considering how ordinary Venetians were involved in politics, and how popular politics and contestation manifested themselves in this densely populated and diverse city. Together the chapters propose a more nuanced notion of political interactions and highlight the role that ordinary people played in shaping the city’s political configuration, as well as how the authorities monitored and punished contestation. Popular Politics in an Aristocratic Republic combines recent historiographical approaches to classic themes from political, social, economic, and religious Venetian history with contributions on gender, migration, and urban space. The volume will be essential reading for students of Venetian history, medieval and early modern Italy and Europe, political and social history.

The Limits of Identity: Early Modern Venice, Dalmatia, and the Representation of Difference

The Limits of Identity: Early Modern Venice, Dalmatia, and the Representation of Difference
Author: Karen-edis Barzman
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 389
Release: 2017-04-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004331514

This book considers the production of collective identity in Venice (Christian, civic-minded, anti-tyrannical), which turned on distinctions drawn in various fields of representation from painting, sculpture, print, and performance to classified correspondence. Dismemberment and decapitation bore a heavy burden in this regard, given as indices of an arbitrary violence ascribed to Venice’s long-time adversary, “the infidel Turk.” The book also addresses the recuperation of violence in Venetian discourse about maintaining civic order and waging crusade. Finally, it examines mobile populations operating in the porous limits between Venetian Dalmatia and Ottoman Bosnia and the distinctions they disrupted between “Venetian” and “Turk” until their settlement on farmland of the Venetian state. This occurred in the eighteenth century with the closing of the borderlands, thresholds of difference against which early modern “Venetian-ness” was repeatedly measured and affirmed.

The Jewish Ghetto and the Visual Imagination of Early Modern Venice

The Jewish Ghetto and the Visual Imagination of Early Modern Venice
Author: Dana E. Katz
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 203
Release: 2017-08-18
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1107165148

This book explores how the Jewish ghetto engaged the sensory imagination of Venice in complex and contradictory ways to shape urban space and reshape Christian-Jewish relations.

The Routledge Handbook of Maritime Trade around Europe 1300-1600

The Routledge Handbook of Maritime Trade around Europe 1300-1600
Author: Wim Blockmans
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 671
Release: 2017-02-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 1315278553

The Routledge Handbook of Maritime Trade around Europe 1300-1600 explores the links between maritime trading networks around Europe, from the Mediterranean and the Atlantic to the North and Baltic Seas. Maritime trade routes connected diverse geographical and cultural spheres, contributing to a more integrated Europe in both cultural and material terms. This volume explores networks’ economic functions alongside their intercultural exchanges, contacts and practical arrangements in ports on the European coasts. The collection takes as its central question how shippers and merchants were able to connect regional and interregional trade circuits around and beyond Europe in the late medieval period. It is divided into four parts, with chapters in Part I looking across broad themes such as ships and sailing routes, maritime law, financial linkages and linguistic exchanges. In the following parts - divided into the Mediterranean, the Baltic Sea, and the Atlantic and North Seas - contributors present case studies addressing themes including conflict resolution, relations between different types of main ports and their hinterland, the local institutional arrangements supporting maritime trade, and the advantages and challenges of locations around the continent. The volume concludes with a summary that points to the extraterritorial character of trading systems during this fascinating period of expansion. Drawing together an international team of contributors, The Routledge Handbook of Maritime Trade around Europe is a vital contribution to the study of maritime history and the history of trade. It is essential reading for students and scholars in these fields.

English Travellers to Venice 1450 –1600

English Travellers to Venice 1450 –1600
Author: Michael G. Brennan
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 615
Release: 2022-02-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000528340

English Travellers to Venice 1450 –1600 contains 35 separate accounts (with 27 colour and 45 black and white illustrations) of the experiences of a wide range of English travellers to Venice. These accounts, drawn from contemporary manuscript and printed sources, provide vivid impressions of the challenges and hardships endured by visitors to the city and of the complexities of Anglo-Venetian relations during the pre- and post-Reformation periods. They also communicate these travellers’ sense of wonder at the city’s grandeur and artistic treasures and their enduring fascination with Venice’s republican government, political structures and Mediterranean possessions. These travellers include pilgrims, scholars, religious exiles, ambassadors, English courtiers and noblemen, eccentric and renegade characters, seafarers and an undercover intelligence gatherer during the late 1580s for Sir Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth’s ‘spymaster’. This volume’s introduction assesses elements of Anglo-Venetian contacts between 1450 and 1600 and examines some specific topics, such as: the leading role of Venetian naval experts in attempts in 1545 to salvage Henry VIII’s flagship the Mary Rose; a first-hand account by an English visitor’s servant of the disastrous and lethal 1575–7 outbreak of the plague at Venice; and, during the build-up to the Spanish Armada, the impressive international reach of the Venetian intelligence service which enabled the doge and Council to remain well informed about both Spanish and English plans. In addition to the colour plates, illustrating the brilliant artistic achievements of Venetian art by Bellini, Carpaccio, Titian, Veronese and Tintoretto, the volume includes a selection of engravings of Venetian life from the renowned collections of Giacomo Franco. A wide range of illustrations is also included from important early maps of Venice, by Erhard Reuwich for Bernard von Breydenbach’s Peregrinatio in Terram Sanctam (1486), Hartmann Schedel’s Liber chronicarum (1493), Jacopo de’ Barbari’s aerial view of Venice (1500) and the stunning map of Venice in Civitates orbis terrarum (1572–1617) by Georg Braun and Frans Hogenberg. Perhaps most remarkable is that many of the locations, buildings, religious objects and artistic treasures described in this volume may still be seen today by visitors to this unique Italian city, renowned for centuries as ‘La Serenissima’.

A Cultural History of Democracy in the Renaissance

A Cultural History of Democracy in the Renaissance
Author: Virginia Cox
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2022-12-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1350273287

This volume offers a broad exploration of the cultural history of democracy in the Renaissance. The Renaissance has rarely been considered an important moment in the history of democracy. Nonetheless, as this volume shows, this period may be seen as a “democratic laboratory” in many, often unexpected, ways. The classicizing cultural movement known as humanism, which spread throughout Europe and beyond in this period, had the effect of vastly enhancing knowledge of the classical democratic and republican traditions. Greek history and philosophy, including the story of Athenian democracy, became fully known in the West for the first time in the postclassical world. Partly as a result of this, the period from 1400 to 1650 witnessed rich and historically important debates on some of the enduring political issues at the heart of democratic culture: issues of sovereignty, of liberty, of citizenship, of the common good, of the place of religion in government. At the same time, the introduction of printing, and the emergence of a flourishing, proto-journalistic news culture, laid the basis for something that recognizably anticipates the modern “public sphere.” The expansion of transnational and transcontinental exchange, in what has been called the “age of encounters,” gave a new urgency to discussions of religious and ethnic diversity. Gender, too, was a matter of intense debate in this period, as was, specifically, the question of women's relation to political agency and power. This volume explores these developments in ten chapters devoted to the notions of sovereignty, liberty, and the “common good”; the relation of state and household; religion and political obligation; gender and citizenship; ethnicity, diversity, and nationalism; democratic crises and civil resistance; international relations; and the development of news culture. It makes a pressing case for a fresh understanding of modern democracy's deep roots.

The Revolt of Snowballs

The Revolt of Snowballs
Author: Claire Judde de Larivière
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2018-06-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 0429996586

The Revolt of Snowballs unpicks a rare and turbulent event which occurred in 1511 and investigates the meaning behind it. On January 27, 1511, the island of Murano was the scene of an exceptional event during which the representative of Venice, exercising power in the island on behalf of the Serenissima, was hunted by the inhabitants under a shower of snowballs and the sound of a hostile clamour. This book uses microhistory techniques to examine the trial records of the incident and explores the lives of the Murano’s inhabitants at its heart. The book begins by providing a detailed introduction to life in Murano during the sixteenth century, including its political framework and the relationship it shared with Venice. Against this context, the political skills of Murano’s inhabitants are considered and key questions regarding political action are posed, including why and how people chose to protest, what sense of justice drove their actions, and what form those actions took. The latter half of the book charts the events that followed the revolt of snowballs, including the inquest and its impact on Murano’s society. By putting Murano under the microscope, The Revolt of Snowballs provides a window into the cultural and political world of early modern Italy, and is essential reading for historians of revolt and microhistory more broadly.

Venice's Intimate Empire

Venice's Intimate Empire
Author: Erin Maglaque
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2018-06-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501721666

Mining private writings and humanist texts, Erin Maglaque explores the lives and careers of two Venetian noblemen, Giovanni Bembo and Pietro Coppo, who were appointed as colonial administrators and governors. In Venice’s Intimate Empire, she uses these two men and their families to showcase the relationship between humanism, empire, and family in the Venetian Mediterranean. Maglaque elaborates an intellectual history of Venice’s Mediterranean empire by examining how Venetian humanist education related to the task of governing. Taking that relationship as her cue, Maglaque unearths an intimate view of the emotions and subjectivities of imperial governors. In their writings, it was the affective relationships between husbands and wives, parents and children, humanist teachers and their students that were the crucible for self-definition and political decision making. Venice’s Intimate Empire thus illuminates the experience of imperial governance by drawing connections between humanist education and family affairs. From marriage and reproduction to childhood and adolescence, we see how intimate life was central to the Bembo and Coppo families’ experience of empire. Maglaque skillfully argues that it was within the intimate family that Venetians’ relationships to empire—its politics, its shifting social structures, its metropolitan and colonial cultures—were determined.