Early modern Rome

Much debate has centred on the Elias Norbert's concept of the civilizing process, the transformation of Early Modern Europe from an uncontrolled society, in which people could not govern their impulses, to a "civilized" society. This process, aided by the imposition of new social and religious norms. However, Natalie Zemon Davis has remarked that, in order to achieve a well-rounded knowledge on the construction of personal identity, scholars must investigate more than the processes of «réinscription du pouvoir», as suggested by Foucault, but also observe people's oppositions to the power. Using judicial records, which demonstrate the resistance to governmental authority and rebellion against repression, the aim of this paper is to show how, in late Sixteenth-century, Romans reacted to the progressive criminalization of behaviours. This is attested by the increasing number of trials for attacks against the sbirri, the constables of the Governor's Court, Rome's main judicial authority.

This essay reconstructs the story of hidden collaborations between the Amsterdam bookseller Johannes Janssonius and the Roman Inquisition in 1660. It provides evidence that the papacy tacitly permitted the circulation of an explicitly Copernican book at a surprisingly early date and that the Protestant publisher was eager to curry favor with the Holy Office by secretly submitting texts to Catholic censorship. Building on recent scholarship that depicts Catholic censors as mediators between the Church and Italian authors, the essay argues that, in the second half of the seventeenth century, they came to play a similar role in an international, multiconfessional context. Censorship should not be construed merely as an external force, impeding the creation and communication of knowledge; it was an integral component of the European in- formation order, shaping scholarship and how it moved. The Holy Office was a node in the Republic of Letters.

Much debate has centred on the Elias Norbert’s concept of the civilizing process, the transformation of early modern Europe from an uncontrolled society, in which people could not govern their impulses to a "civilized" society. This process, aided by the imposition of new social and religious norms. However, Natalie Zemon Davis has remarked that, in order to achieve a well-rounded knowledge on the construction of personal identity, scholars must investigate more than the processes of «réinscription du pouvoir», as suggested by Foucault, but also observe people's oppositions to the power. Using judicial records, which demonstrate the resistance to governmental authority and rebellion against repression, the aim of this paper is to show how in late sixteenth-century Romans reacted to the progressive criminalization of behaviours. This is attested by the increasing number of trials for attacks against sbirri, the constables of the Tribunale del Governatore, Rome’s main judicial authority.

In 1549, St. Francis Xavier sent a letter from Malacca, mentioning that a queen of the Moluccas had converted to Christianity while he was traveling in those islands. Little is known about the baptism of this queen, who is often called Niachile Pocoraga in European sources; however, this story would later serve as a basis for Xavier’s fame as a baptizer of Asian sovereigns and images of her baptism became a part of the missionary saint’s iconography in the visual arts. This paper will focus on two images located in prominent Roman churches – one by Giovanni Battista Gaulli in Sant’Andrea al Quirinale and another by Andrea Carlone in the Gesù – and will analyze these paintings in light of the often complicated relationships Jesuit had with the Roman women they sought as supporters, proposing that the image of Niachile was crafted to present a Jesuit vision of the ideal woman.

How important was it for merchants, artisans, inn-keepers and painters to have brothers and to work with them? By cross-referencing different sources (states of souls, testaments, inventories, court papers, compilations of legal and notary deeds), this article seeks to answer the question by taking some crucial aspects into consideration:
daily life in the family home and other forms of cohabitation, the transmission of work tools and of vocations, the training of new generations and the support provided to family members in trouble. Seventeenth-century Rome is an interesting vantage point from which to investigate the importance of brothers’companies. The presence of the Papal Roman court extended employment opportunities, not only for courtiers, artists and servants who moved from one embassy to another and from one cardinal’s court to another, but also for all those men
(more men than women) on the margins who were able to earn some money from the conspicuous consumption of the upper classes. The flexibility of the labour market and the widespread phenomenon of male cohabitation could undermine the strength of family companies.

Post-mortems may have become a staple of our TV viewing, but the long history of this practice is still little known. This book provides a fresh account of the dissections that took place across early modern Europe on those who had died of a disease or in unclear circumstances. Drawing on different approaches and on sources as varied as notes taken at the dissection table, legal records and learned publications, the chapters explore how autopsies informed the understanding of pathology of all those involved. With a broad geography, including Rome, Amsterdam and Geneva, the book recaptures the lost worlds of physicians, surgeons, patients, families and civic authorities as they used corpses to understand diseases and make sense of suffering. The evidence from post-mortems was not straightforward, but between 1500 and 1750 medical practitioners rose to the challenge, proposing various solutions to the difficulties they encountered and creating a remarkable body of knowledge. The book shows the scope and diversity of this tradition and how laypeople contributed their knowledge and expectations to the wide-ranging exchanges stimulated by the opening of bodies.

The Colosseum had an ambivalent status in early-modern Christian Rome: on one hand the most remarkable remnant of ancient grandeur, the foremost landmark of the city and the obvious architectural model to imitate and emulate; on the other hand the stage for the most brutal persecution and execution of early Christian martyrs. This paper shows how the ambivalence made the ancient monument a most striking and productive stage for religious ceremonial in early modernity; how the emotional intensity of the religious performance was heightened by the sublime ruin and the gory narratives that it evoked; and how the Colosseum in its turn was transformed, physically as well as conceptually, by the performances.

While the presence of major composers at the Ospedale di Santo Spirito in Sassia and its neighbouring church in the early modern period has long been recognised, there has been little attempt to interpret the bare archival evidence of their tenancy in the light of the multiple strands of intellectual activity – religious, scientific, medical and musical - for which the hospital provided a locus. The location of an organ in the hospital ward and the logistics and economics of everyday musical practice implied by such an instrument in this space, provides a background for the exchange of ideas about music via a circle of intellectual virtuosi connected to the hospital. This paper will present some early results of a research project that aims to synthesise evidence relating to music, medicine and concepts of healing extracted from sources in the archives of the hospital and related collections.

Until now, conclusions about Frescobaldi’s employment at the Ospedale di S. Spirito in Sassia during the 1620s have been drawn largely from payment records. As he was apparently working simultaneously as organist in the Cappella Giulia at St Peter’s, Hammond, in his biography of the composer, refers to Frescobaldi’s activity at the Ospedale as ‘moonlighting’.  While the financial documentation of the Cappella Giulia is relatively complete, there are gaps in the surviving pay documents in the archive of the Ospedale.
Other documents relating to the Ospedale which discuss music, including descriptions, decrees, orders and rubrics, survive in the Archivio Secreta Vaticana, the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale and the Archivio di Stato di Roma. These supplement the financial records with a range of information and underline the importance of music to the confraternity and within the hospital community. A rubric for the entire church year in particular indicates musical requirements for ordinary days and feast days and notes specific instructions in relation to the organ. This paper assesses the evidence of this archival material alongside the financial records and will throw fresh light on Frescobaldi’s activities and the working life of musicians at the Ospedale in the 1620s.

The statuta Urbis are the oldest municipal statutes of Rome that have reached us. They were issued in 1360-63 by the will of the "popular government", governing the city with its own laws during the Avignon Papacy. The "popular" statuta ruled the legal and institutional life of the city until the return of the popes in Rome. In the 18th century, the ancient manuscripts of the statutes emerged from Vatican archives. As soon as Rome became capital of Italy, in 1871, legal and historical studies on the text, promoted by roman cultural institutions, flourished.

The sixteenth century marks a watershed in the study of the natural world, and animals within it. Never before did so many Europeans devote so much ink to describing animals, their physical characteristics, their utility, and the environment in which they lived. Reading, observation, correspondence, illustration, and conversation represented key moments in this process of knowledge production. While the first four aspects have received sustained attention from intellectual historians and historians of science, much less emphasis has been placed on the key role of the spoken word in shaping early modern natural knowledge. This article examines the significance of oral discourse in transmitting natural knowledge within the social setting of seventeenth‐century Rome and among Italian natural historians more broadly. It focuses on the way in which the study of unusual animals such as the whale (and by extension ambergris, the substance that it allegedly produced) was shaped by the oral testimony of those who saw it first‐hand, often with little distinction being made between the social and professional status of different informants. While the oral testimony of a learned missionary may have trumped that of others, ultimately pride of place was given to first‐hand experience over second‐hand written accounts. Personal acquaintance also played an important role. On the whole, the examples analyzed in this article aim to illustrate the plurality of means and voices that actively contributed to the making of early‐modern natural knowledge of animals. Within the inductive method that characterized early modern natural history, conversation and hearsay thus played an active and significant role that historians of science have mostly underestimated.