Filippo De Vivo

Ordering the archive in early modern Venice (1400–1650)

The Republic of Venice was renowned for gathering and preserving from very early on a huge and growing archive. This article analyses the ways in which records were created, stored, and ordered for both immediate and future use. The political system of Venice, at once aristocratic and republican, had an important impact on the production and preservation of large quantities of documents in unbound filze and bound registri. In turn, the volume of this paperwork required the development of strict criteria for the organization of the material. In particular, this article analyses how records were divided at the moment of production, thus enabling a pragmatic combination of chronological and thematic ordering criteria. The latter were reinforced by finding tools arranged by subject matter, in particular indexes inside each volume and more general indexes across several volumes, both known as rubriche. The article suggests that indexing must be seen as a historical process dependent on Venice’s political structures and tied to specific moments in the wider history of the Republic, respectively in the fifteenth, early sixteenth, and early seventeenth centuries. Finally, the article points to some unexpected interactions between political secrecy and indexing.

Prospect or Refuge? Microhistory, History on the Large Scale

The persistent debate about microhistory is testimony to the impact of its contribution to the wider revolution that, over the last two generations, has radically and irretrievably transformed the way in which we write, and think, about the past. At the heart of the microhistorical method is a commitment to the close study of individuals, localities and events in their precise historical context, as an antidote to the teleology and elitism of traditional political history, on the one hand, and as an alternative to the reductive determinism of social history as it was practised in the 1950s and 1960s on the other. Microhistory has to do with choice and use of sources: the substitution of the serial with the precisely contextualized. The bold vocation of this method, especially of its most inspired practitioners, has always been to combine erudite pleasure with vision, so as to address large historical problems and to correct grand historical narratives, from the notion of mentality to that of the state, from changing conceptions of the body to the family and social relations. Indeed, to identify microhistory with the size of its object is a common misconception – not least because describing individuals, places or events as ‘small’ is absurd as well as patronizing. If anything, as John Brewer’s excellent recent article shows, what is small is the metaphorical distance between subject and object arising from close observation.1 In fact, strictly speaking, since there is an inverse proportionality between the size of an object and the scale of the map used to represent it, microhistory is history on the large, not the small, scale.2 Microhistory largely imposed itself as a tag, yet this has resulted in a certain number of inaccuracies in the literature. Both facts are true, incidentally, of the so-called Annales ‘school’ too, which is not all longue durée and quantification (think of Lucien Febvre’s work, for example). However, generalizations are most paradoxical when they refer to works based on the notion that ‘God is in the detail’. As Brewer and others have D VI VO P ro sp ec to r R ef ug e? M ic ro hi st or y, H is to ry on th e La rg e S ca le

Paolo Sarpi and the Uses of Information in Seventeenth-Century Venice*

For the political elite of early modern Venice, the spread of political information was both an everyday reality and a permanent source of anxiety. For centuries the city had been a thriving centre of information. As the capital of an empire stretching to the Aegean, and a crucial harbour between long-distance maritime routes, Venice had the means of offering a great amount of information. As an important market and the seat of large commercial enterprises, it also had a great demand for news. For many in the city news meant profit, influencing prices and financial speculations [1]. Contrary to a common historiographical assumption privileging the study of the printing press, this heritage did not suddenly disappear as a result of Venice’s economic decline in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In fact, as has recently been shown, in the second half of the sixteenth century the amount of news readily available in the city to wider and wider circles of people exploded. Mainly through the medium of manuscript newsletters known as avvisi , professional news-writers turned what had been the preserve of an elite of merchants and politicians into a saleable commodity. Twice weekly, they sent multiple copies of their avvisi to scores of subscribers*/many of them news-writers too, who in turn added the information they received to their own newsletters for further subscribers [2]. It is no doubt in this way that Venice provided a large proportion of the information which eventually made the contents of foreign printed periodicals. In the period 1647 /1663, for example, Venice was the second most frequent provenance of the Gazette de France ’s entries, after Paris and before London, Rome and Vienna [3]. Almost all Dutch and English printed corantos similarly reproduced paragraphs from the avvisi , and in fact the earliest extant exemplar of that series began with a piece of news from Venice [4]. Though making great use of the avvisi , the political elites*/Venetian patricians, foreign diplomats and the host of professionals in their service*/were appalled at this spread of information. The Council of Ten, the body watching over the security of the state, repeatedly prohibited the sale of written news since at least 1567 [5]. Similar condemnations were voiced by political writers, especially in the large literature on reason of state, this period’s most important mode of political discourse. The underlying theme of these treatises was precisely that the substance of politics is different from its appearance, and must be kept secret to the many who would not have understood it anyway. As Ludovico Zuccolo complained in Venice in 1621, ‘few are the men who, having no experience of government, don’t want to judge the administration of republics and empires’, and down to the humblest artisans ‘think they know what is done for reason of state and what is not’ [6]. Much research still needs to be done concerning both the mechanisms of the information trade and its regulation by the government. In this paper I draw on these findings to show that,

Archival transformations in Early Modern European history

This special issue addresses a double transformation. The first is the historical process that saw a dramatic increase in the production of documents and a substantial improvement in their management and preservation throughout Europe between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries. The early modern period, broadly conceived, is often described as the age of print, but it was also the great time of archives, understood as both the physical repositories and organized offices established by institutions or collectivities to store handwritten documents produced in the course of continuous functions with a view to long-term use. For many European historians, the process of centralization, expansion and (more or less successful) rearrangement of archives is symbolized by the establishment of the great Simancas and Vatican archives in 1540 and 1612 respectively. But, as the articles collected here demonstrate, smaller states also enacted reforms in record-keeping, and these changes were more concerned with archives than with central institutions. The second transformation is interpretive and methodological. Archives have long been at the centre of historians’ research, but over the last ten to fifteen years, an ‘archival turn’ in disciplines ranging from history, literature, anthropology and the social sciences has transformed archives from sites of research into objects of enquiry in their own right. These works study the evolving processes of selection, ordering and usage that produced archives not as neutral repositories of sources but as historically constructed tools of power relations, deeply embedded in changing social and cultural contexts. The history of archives has been long practised by archivists, who are professionally aware that documents were neither produced nor arranged as

Archives of Speech: Recording Diplomatic Negotiation in Late Medieval and Early Modern Italy

Early modern diplomatic negotiation was conducted primarily through face-to-face encounters dominated by the oral medium, generally known as audiences. Yet ambassadors were very keen to take written records of the words spoken by themselves and their counterparts. This article considers the role of oral exchange in diplomatic audiences and the reasons why participants were so interested in recording and filing reports of those exchanges. This article begins with an analysis of diplomatic dispatches, the genre that has attracted most scholarship so far, but then goes on to trace the recording of audiences on the part of hosting sovereigns and their chanceries and secretaries. The article compares three examples: the transcripts of ambassadors’ speeches by fifteenth-century Florentine chancellors, the diaries of papal masters of ceremonies in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and, the most detailed example of audience records, the Esposizioni archive of thousands of ambassadorial speeches, replies and subsequent conversation, assembled by secretaries of the Venetian republic from the mid-sixteenth century onwards. These examples enable us to perceive oral culture in unexpected settings. Moreover, the Venetian case constitutes a typical example of archival transformation: an increase in quantity accompanied by a substantial and conscious improvement in preservation methods and retrieval tools. In order to explain this transformation, this article traces the uses that were intended and made of the records at the time, not just to report on current, but to inform future negotiations.Early modern diplomatic negotiation was conducted primarily through face-to-face encounters dominated by the oral medium, generally known as audiences. Yet ambassadors were very keen to take written records of the words spoken by themselves and their counterparts. This paper considers the role of oral exchange in diplomatic audiences and the reasons why participants were so interested in recording and filing reports of those exchanges. This paper begins with an analysis of diplomatic dispatches, the genre that has attracted most scholarship so far, but then goes on to trace the recording of audiences on the part of hosting sovereigns and their chanceries and secretaries. The article compares three examples: the transcripts of ambassadors’ speeches by fifteenth-century Florentine chancellors, the diaries of papal masters of ceremonies in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and, the most detailed example of audience records, the Esposizioni archive of thousands of ambassadorial speeches, replies, and subsequent conversation, assembled by secretaries of the Venetian republic from the mid-sixteenth century onwards. These examples enable us to perceive oral culture in unexpected settings. Moreover, the Venetian case constitutes a typical example of archival transformation: an increase in quantity accompanied by a substantial and conscious improvement in preservation methods and retrieval tools. In order to explan this transformation, this article traces the uses that were intended and made of the records at the time, not just to report on current, but to inform future negotiations.

Walking in sixteenth-century Venice: mobilizing the early modern city

LIKE BREATHING, WALKING IS AN UNCONSCIOUS ACT that we accomplish without consideration, at least as long as we are free to move. We feel our muscles only when we trek a long way; otherwise we just advance one foot after the other, reflexively. Walking is also universal: humans have walked and learned to walk in much the same way since they became erect. And yet cultural critics, anthropologists, and geographers have shown how footwork has meanings and functions that change across space and time. In the modern metropolis, walking has long been associated with intense sensual and intellectual stimulation. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Georg Simmel famously reflected on the psychological effects of crossing busy roads or encountering new environments around every street corner. Later, Walter Benjamin and Michel de Certeau both described walking as a distinctive learning experience. These thinkers have greatly influenced the cultural history of early modern cities, yet walking has attracted relatively little historiographical attention, despite

Francia e Inghilterra di fronte all'interdetto di Venezia

Book synopsis: This volume presents recent studies by European specialists on the thought and works of Paolo Sarpi (1552-1623), who played a crucial role in European diplomatic and political relations of his time.