In early modern Venice, a city replete with professionals of intelligence conveniently located mid-way between East and West, pharmacies were amongst the most important centres where people met to exchange news, discuss current affairs and occasionally criticise political trends. Parallel to their main activities, many apothecaries sold illicit pamphlets and newsheets behind the counter, offering their premises as a convenient – and comfortable – shelter for those wishing to discuss the news. Medical shops hosted different kinds of sociable activities, as reflected in the arrangement of space and furniture, as well as in the timing of the shops’ activities. As can be traced in contemporary descriptions, in inquisitorial records, and in intelligence reports, political and religious topics combined with medical ones in the pharmacy conversation of elites as well as ordinary people. The study of pharmacies reveals a different centre for the exchange of news than the coffee-houses made famous in Jurgen Habermas’ study of the “public sphere” – and it also allows us to revise that famous account by grounding communication and the exchange of ideas in their material context. Contents: Pharmacies and the Inquisition The Inquisitors of State and the Pharmacy at the Sign of the Sun Well-Known Meeting Places A Socially Diverse Clientele Information and the Apothecaries’ Business"

This study analyzes the campo of San Pietro di Castello from its mythologized origins to the Renaissance, paying particular attention to the architectural and political forces that shaped it. Although San Pietro was Venice's cathedral from the ninth to the nineteenth centuries, civic leaders marginalized the site, which incarnated the contentious relationship between the Roman Church and the Venetian republic. The essay places the campo at the center of inquiry because the episcopal complex's significance is best discerned through diachronic analysis of the urban landscape. The building activities of its medieval and Quattrocento patrons generated a heterogeneous campo that incorporated morphological elements from two Venetian urbanistic types: the parish campo and the monastic island. Its sixteenth-century patriarchs created a new architectural vision of the campo, contesting its slippage from the center of Venetian life and forging a distinctive ensemble that differs markedly from the better-known piazzas at San Marco and Rialto.

This article focuses on the contribution of anti-Jewish themes to political ideals and reality in the works of two leading Venetian patrician humanists — Ludovico Foscarini and Paolo Morosini. The article demonstrates that their literary attacks on Jews were shaped by classical, patristic, medieval, and humanist texts, and by the experience of service to the state. It also demonstrates that their work contributed to debates about the toleration of Jews in Venetian territory and can be linked to the humanist engagement with Judaism at a critical point for both phenomena in the fifteenth century.

Carpaccio’s Saint Ursula cycle (1490s) is replete with references to marriage, a matter that was of great social and political concern to Venetians and was increasingly understood as essential to maintaining the purity of the patrician class. Close study of Carpaccio’s work, however, reveals a multivalent interpretation of marriage. Here it is both stabilizing and destructive, a noble duty and a worldly distraction from higher callings. This paper argues that the cycle’s complexities were well suited to the mixed-gender, mixed-class institution that commissioned it, the scuola piccola (minor lay confraternity) dedicated to Ursula, and invite broader reconsideration of scuola politics.

While Ann Carmichael has traced an epidemiological link between the poor and epidemic diseases conflated with plague, she suggests that this association served as a focus for the concerns and fears of the elite, needing, as she put it, “the attention of a social historian more than a medical one.” In sixteenth-century Venice there is perhaps no better source to examine these sociopolitical concerns than the 40,000-page diary of Venetian nobleman Marin Sanudo, who yearned to serve as the republic’s official historian. Sanudo was well aware of Venice’s need to bolster its body politic from a myriad of external threats. I argue that the result would lead, not merely to the identification of the foreign poor as the source of the epidemic of the late 1520s, but also to their representation as being physiologically predisposed to acting as the very plague itself, which was afflicting the “body of the city.”

This article explores one of the earliest centrally organized state intelligence services in world history. Contrary to the orthodoxy that sees systematized intelligence as a modern political phenomenon, this was developed in early modern Venice. The article reveals the complex organization of Venetian systemized intelligence that distinguished it from other contemporaneous states’ espionage networks. It also shows how Venetian authorities commodified intelligence by engaging citizens and subjects in a trade of information for mutual benefits. Ultimately, the article challenges our understanding of early modern political communication and offers a fresh vista of intelligence as a business trait and economic necessity.

An English translation of "Le peuple est la cité: L’idée de popolo et la condition des popolani à Venise (XVe-XVIe siècles)", Annales HSS 68.4 (2013): 1113-40

This article examines the evolution of cryptology as a business trait and a distinct state-controlled and -regulated profession in sixteenth-century Venice. It begins by briefly discussing the systematic development of cryptology in the Renaissance. Following an examination of the amateur use of codes and ciphers by members of the Venetian merchant and ruling class, and subsequently by members of all layers of Venetian society, the article moves on to discuss the professionalization of cryptology in sixteenth-century Venice. This was premised on specialist skills formation, a shared professional identity, and an emerging professional ethos. The article explores a potential link between the amateur use of cryptology, especially as it had been instigated by merchants in the form of merchant-style codes, and its professional use by the Venetian authorities. It also adds the profession of the cifrista—the professional cipher secretary—to the list of more “conventional” early modern professions.

Street singers were crucial figures in Italian Renaissance urban culture, mediating between printed, written and oral forms of communication. Performing in the central piazza,they offered entertainment, news, satire and commentary on current events to heterogeneous publics. But as the communicative capacities of the singers reached their peak, increasingly their presence in the city was seen as threatening and disruptive. The struggle for control of the piazza became particularly bitter in the later sixteenth century, when civic and ecclesiastical authorities strove to render public urban spaces more orderly and magnificent and to police the borders between sacred and profane spaces, times and ideas. Keywords: orality, print culture, street performance, news, control

Architecture is defined by intentional design, while cities are the product of multiple human actions over a long period of time. This seems to confine us between a view of architecture as authored object and a view of the city as authorless socioeconomic process. This debate goes back to the separation of architecture from its skill base in building craft that took place in the Renaissance, including its division from the processes by which cities are produced by clients, users, regulatory codes, markets and infrastructures. As a result, architecture is confined in exceptional cases to the status of iconic buildings, or more generally to the status of buildings as economic production. Currently, buildings and cities are appropriated by digital technology and ubiquitous computing as a way of managing the city's assets. Digital technologies integrate designing with making, informational models of buildings with geographic information systems and digital mapping. What had to be separated from city-making practices in order to raise architecture to a different status is increasingly re-integrated through digital infrastructure. As for architecture, traditionally engaged with the design of objects rather than networks or systems, is deprived of relevance in shaping social capital, politically and intellectually sidelined. Focusing on the Piazza San Marco in relationship to the urban fabric of Venice this paper traces the interlocking spheres of self-conscious architecture, the institutional and intellectual resources mobilised by Venetian statecraft and the networked spaces of everyday action. It argues that the scenographic design of the Piazza annexed the urban structure of Venice, historiography and civic rituals to advocate a centralised city of ceremonial processions, exalting the state and the Republic. The intersection of architecture, theatre and the street reduced the complexity of the city into a theatrical set and used perspective to make it synoptically available to the eye. Tracing morphological paradigms of early modernity, this paper unravels the rise of architecture as an elitist practice parallel to the rise of the state, and a theoretical framework for theorising its relationship with the city.

The 2011 Historic Urban Landscape Recommendation by UNESCO defines cities as dynamic environments subject to cultural processes, tangible/intangible heritage and community values, leaving some key questions open. Is the heritage sector better defining historic places, or because their complexity defies verbal description, it reiterates simplified concepts? Are existing boundaries between disciplines such as architecture, planning and landscape design enriching or constraining heritage? This paper analyses the urban morphology of Venice and the Piazza San Marco, a key context in which architecture emerges as legitimised vehicle for urban regeneration in early modernity. Looking at the relationship between the Piazza and the urban networks of Venice alongside intangible spatial practices and symbols, the paper makes three contributions to urban conservation: a) it defines the HUL as the interrelationship of the anonymous city with the authored products of design, b) it revisits the foundations of early modern consciousness about architecture, urban conservation and innovation in order to better understand interdisciplinary knowledge in the heritage sector and c) it approaches heritage as social construction , involving the selection of structures, from buildings to entire areas, and from legal documents and political instruments to ideologies through which societies are seen from dominant positions, often disguising conflict.

Explores the nature and origin of fifteenth-century accounts of a storm that struck Venice in 1342, and offers an explanation for the miracle story - three saints who saved the city from demons - that became attached to historical memory of this event.

Numerous scholars have sought to locate the origins of social scientific research in the late-sixteenth-century ars apodemica, the northern European body of literature dedicated to methodizing educational travel. Little attention has been paid, however, to the earlier model of educational travel that emerged from sixteenth-century Venetian diplomatic culture. For many Venetian citizens and patricians, accompanying an ambassador on a foreign mission served as a cornerstone of their political education. Diplomatic travelers were encouraged to keep written accounts of their voyage. Numerous examples of these journals survive from the sixteenth century, largely following a standard formula and marked by an emphasis on the description of customs. This article examines the educational function of diplomatic travel in Venice and the practices of cultural description that emerged from diplomatic travel, arguing that Venetian diplomatic travel offers an earlier model for the methodization of travel—one with its own distinctive norms of observation.

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This essay provides a survey of histories of Venice from the earliest medieval works, through the transformative nineteenth-century publications of Romanin and others, up to the most recent collective projects of the late twentieth century.

Drawing upon extensive new primary source material from state and private archives, the paper demonstrates the relative independence that women in the life of sixteenth-century playwright Angelo Beolco (Ruzante), both in his Padua family of origin and in the families of his Venetian hosts, managed to achieve despite strict legal controls on their conduct. Their independence often resulted from their ability to take advantage either of their relative wealth or of their relatively marginal position to achieve an unusual degree of freedom or control over their lives. A number of those same families were also patrons of Palladio's. Two genealogical corrections to the paper: as Johanna Heinrichs has shown, Francesco Pisani did register the birth of his son Zuan (Giovanni), several months beyond the usual deadline when he returned from the defense of Padua. Additionally, the Barbaro genealogies give two opposite accounts of the descendants of Alvise Cornaro. In Alvise's entry, cited in the paper (Barbaro 3: 34), his descent line is explicitly excluded because of the circumstances of his birth. However, in the entry of Alvise's son-in-law (Zuan Corner di Fantin aka Giovanni Cornaro di Fantino Barbaro 3: 17), the husband of Alvise's daughter and only child who belonged to an important and established patrician Cornaro line, the descent line continues uninterrupted.

The sixteenth-century reckoning with extra-European peoples and cultures occurred at precisely the same moment that humanists were increasingly preoccupied with the daily life, material culture, and lived religion of classical antiquity. Leading figures in sixteenth-century antiquarianism took an abiding interest in ethnographic accounts of contemporary peoples and even produced such accounts. This article examines how sixteenth-century readers and scholars placed bodies of literature on ancient and modern customs in dialogue with one another. While scholars have long appreciated that ethnographic and travel writing were deeply mediated by the study of antiquity, that mediation cut both ways. This article addresses the question of how ethnographic descriptions of modern peoples shaped sixteenth-century understandings of the customs and lived religion of antiquity. The writings of merchants and humanists testify to the ways in which the practices of ethnographic writing helped to shape travellers’ and readers’ appreciation of the cultural alterity of classical antiquity.

In this dissertation I draw on a variety of Venetian and Ottoman visual, architectural, narrative and poetic sources to shed light on how groups and individuals in these two imperial polities imagined the political significance of conquering and possessing Cyprus. The period under scrutiny is between the island’s Venetian annexation in 1489 and the aftermath of its Ottoman conquest in 1571. In investigating the ways in which different Venetian and Ottoman actors attached historical, mythological, political and eschatological connotations to Cyprus or exploited the already existing ones for their political ends, I pick apart various early modern discursive threads about the Venetian and Ottoman occupations of Cyprus, and then study how they were entangled within and across religious and political boundaries in the early modern Mediterranean and beyond. The result is the only cultural study of how the two major sixteenth-century Mediterranean empires contested the island and what it meant for their respective imperial projects.

Paintings belonging to domestic interior doors and shutters form a distinct genre within Venetian Renaissance art. Originally positioned at privileged thresholds, such as the boundary between two chambers or the front of a substantial cabinet, these works exhibit characteristic structural, decorative, and compositional features. Restoration of surviving and documented pictures to their embedded settings illuminates the complexity of internal arrangements in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century palace. Attention to individual ensembles reveals that the doorway was a site of artistic innovation, hosting paintings with novel subjects and expressive interests that in turn related to the works' unique location and function.

During the difficult sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Venice attempted to maintain a precarious balance with its powerful neighbor, the Ottoman Empire. The key to this effort was the chief Venetian diplomat in Constantinople, the bailo. The complexities of defending the Venice’s position in the Mediterranean required the ablest Venetian officials. Effective service in this most public of positions could provide significant recognition for men at the heights of the Venetian hierarchy, and almost always served as a springboard to more important offices within the Venetian state apparatus.

The labouring classes of early modern Venice, the popolani, made up nearly ninety per cent of the city’s population. Historiography to this point has focused almost exclusively on their professional and civic role. It is the core contention of this article that the contribution of the popolani to Venetian economy and society far exceeded their documented professional and civic function. Using as a case study the homogenous group of the shipbuilders and sailors of Venice and drawing on newly-discovered primary sources from the Venetian State Archives, this article will show the distinct contributions of the popolani to the city’s economy and society through their charity to those in need. This took form in their sizeable dotal and charitable donations within and beyond the family. In one of the first attempts to explore the philanthropy of the lower classes, this article challenges the existing scholarly view that charity was the sole responsibility of the government and the nobility in early modern Venice. It further shows that marriage was not merely a financial union for the popolani; it was a sanctuary for lasting companionship. Ultimately, the article offers a fresh vista onto the socio-economic role of the popolani in early modern Venice.