The sources of civil society in Italy

Journal of Interdisciplinary History

Volumn 29, Issue 3, 1999, Pages 379-406

  Muir, Edward ^a  

^a NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 2342615000     PISSN: 00221953     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/002219598551751     Document Type: Article

References (136)

1. Robert D. Putnam, with Roberto Leonardi and Raffaella Y. Nanetti, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, 1993), 180.
2. On the American historiography of Italy, see Muir, "The Italian Renaissance in America," American Historical Review, C (1995), 1095-1118.
3. For an analysis of politics in Italy before and during the rise of the communes, see Chris Wickham, Early Medieval Italy: Central Power and Local Society, 400-1600 (Ann Arbor, 1981);
4. Giovanni Tobacco, The Struggle for Power in Medieval Italy: Structures of Political Rule (New York, 1989);
5. George W. Dameron, Episcopal Power and Florentine Society, 1000-1320 (Cambridge, Mass., 1991).
6. Cf. the crucial work by Carol Lansing, The Florentine Magnates: Lineage and Faction in a Medieval Commune (Princeton, 1991).
7. Edward C. Banfield, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (Chicago, 1958).
8. Cf. Putnam, Making Democracy Work, 177.
9. Quotations from Machiavelli: The Chief Works and Others (trans. Allan Gilbert) (Durham, 1965), I, 34, 212.
10. Norbert Elias (trans. Edmund Jephcott), The History of Manners. I. The Civilizing Process (New York, 1978).
11. On the dissemination of "civilizing texts," see Peter Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier: The European Perception of Castiglione's Cortegiano (University Park, 1996).
12. For the civic-community index, see Putnam, Making Democracy Work, Table 4.4, 96, and Figure 4.4, 97; 184 for quotation.
13. On Piedmont, see Geoffrey Symcox, Victor Amadeus II: Absolutism in the Savoyard State, 1675-1730 (Berkeley, 1983);
14. on Genoa, Steven A. Epstein, Genoa & the Genoese, 958-1528 (Chapel Hill, 1996).
15. On the early doges, see Pompeo Molmenti, "I bandi e i banditi della repubblica veneta," Nuova Antologia, XVIL (1893), 126-129.
16. Frederic C. Lane, Venice: A Maritime Republic (Baltimore, 1973), 91-95;
17. Marvin B. Becker, Medieval Italy: Constraints and Creativity (Bloomington, 1981);
18. Marvin B. Becker, idem, Civility and Society in Western Europe, 1300-1600 (Bloomington, 1988).
19. On the Dandolo and Tiepolo, see Giorgio Cracco, Società e stato nel medioevo veneziano (secoli XII-XIV) (Florence, 1967), 89-173.
20. The Venetian republic seems to have been particularly effective in creating loyalty among those excluded from formal political power. For the excluded professional and propertied classes, see Brian Pullan, Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice: The Social Institutions of a Catholic State, to 1620 (Oxford, 1971).
21. For artisans in Venice, see Richard T. Rapp, Industry and Economic Decline in Seventeenth-Century Venice (Cambridge, Mass., 1976);
22. Robert C. Davis, Shipbuilders of the Venetian Arsenal: Workers and Workplace in the Preindustrial City (Baltimore, 1991);
23. Robert C. Davis, idem, The War of the Fists: Popular Culture and Public Violence in Late Renaissance Venice (New York, 1994);
24. Richard Mackenney, Tradesmen and Traders: The World of the Guilds in Venice and Europe, c. 1250-c. 1650 (London, 1987).
25. On the criminalization of vendetta in Venice, see Guido Ruggiero, Violence in Early Renaissance Venice (New Brunswick, 1980), 125-155;
26. Guido Ruggiero, idem, The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice (Oxford, 1985), 89-108;
27. Jacques Heers (trans. Barry Herbert), Family Clans in the Middle Ages: A Study of Political and Social Structures in Urban Areas (Amsterdam, 1977), 103;
28. Donald Queller, The Venetian Patriciate: Reality versus Myth (Urbana, 1986), 75-84, 234-239;
29. Stanley Chojnacki, "Crime, Punishment, and the Trecento Venetian State,"
30. and John Kenneth Hyde, "Contemporary Views on Faction and Civil Strife in 13th- and 14th-Century Italy," in Lauro Martines (ed.), Violence and Civil Disorder in Italian Cities, 1200-1500 (Berkeley, 1972), 184-228 and 273-307, respectively;
31. Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan, "Violence, société et pouvour à Venise (XIVe-XVe siècles): Forme et évolution de rituels urbains," Mélanges de l'Ecole française de Rome: Moyen Age - temps modernes, XVIC (1984), 903-936.
32. Margaret L. King, Venetian Humanism in an Age of Patrician Dominance (Princeton, 1986), 92 (first quotation), 150-157 (second quotation from 151 is her translation), 333-335.
33. On the success of the humanist curriculum in Italian education, see Paul F. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning, 1300-1600 (Baltimore, 1989).
34. On revenge humanism, see Gabriel Maugain, Moeures italiennes de la Renaissance: La vengeance (Paris, 1935).
35. On civic religion, see Donald Weinstein, "Critical Issues in the Study of Civic Religion in Renaissance Florence," in Charles Trinkaus with Heiko A. Oberman (eds.), The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion (Leiden, 1974), 265-270.
36. On civic rituals, see Richard Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (New York, 1980);
37. Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton, 1981);
38. Muir, idem, "The Virgin on the Street Corner: The Place of the Sacred in Italian Cities," in Steven Ozment (ed.), Religion and Culture in the Renaissance and Reformation (Kirksville, 1989), 25-40;
39. Ronald F. E. Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood in Renaissance Florence (New York, 1982);
40. Sharon T. Strocchia, Death and Ritual in Renaissance Florence (Baltimore, 1992);
41. Angelo Torre, Il consumo di devozioni: Religione e comunità nelle campagne dell'Ancien Régime (Venice, 1995);
42. Matteo Casini, I gesti del principe: La festa politica a Firenze e Venezi in età rinascimentale (Venice, 1996).
43. Brian Kempers, "Icons, Altarpieces, and Civic Ritual in Siena Cathedral, 1100-1530," in Barbara A. Hanawalt and Kathryn L. Reyerson (eds.), City and Spectacle in Medieval Europe (Minneapolis, 1994), 89-136.
44. Cf. Daniel Waley, Siena and the Sienese in the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge, 1991).
45. Loren Partridge and Randolph Starn, "Triumphalism and the Sala Regia in the Vatican," in Barbara Wisch and Susan Scott Munshower (eds.), "All the World's a Stage . . .": Art and Pageantry in the Renaissance and Baroque (University Park, 1990), 22-81;
46. Loren Partridge and Randolph Starn, idem, Arts of Power: Three Halls of State in Italy, 1300-1600 (Berkeley, 1992).
47. Hans Conrad Peyer, Stadt und Stadtpatron im mittelalterlichen Italien (Zurich, 1955);
48. Patrick J. Geary, Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages (Princeton, 1978).
49. Lee Palmer Wandel, "The Reform of the Images: New Visualization of the Christian Community at Zürich," Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, LXXX (1989), 106-109;
50. David D. Linberg, Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago, 1976), 147-177; quotation on 161.
51. Peyer, Stadt und Stadtpatron.
52. See Muir, "Virgin on the Street Corner," 36-37.
53. The pattern in Naples was even more dramatic in the hinterlands of the kingdom where the organization of local churches guaranteed domination by entrenched local elites who treated church benefices as family sinecures. The systematic evangelization of the populace came late, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the Jesuits launched missions in the South. See David Gentilcore, From Bishop to Witch: The System of the Sacred in Early Modern Terra d'Otranto (Manchester, 1992).
54. On confraternities and charity, see Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood;
55. Pullan, Rich and Poor;
56. Philip Gavitt, Charity and Children in Renaissance Florence: The Ospedale degli Innocenti, 1410-1536 (Ann Arbor, 1990);
57. Carol Bresnahan Menning, Charity and State in Late Renaissance Italy: The Monte di Pietà of Florence (Ithaca, 1993);
58. John Henderson, Piety and Charity in Late Medieval Florence (Oxford, 1994).
59. Giorgio Chittolini, "Civic Religion and the Countryside in Late Medieval Italy," in Trevor Dean and Wickham (eds.), City and Countryside in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy: Essays Presented to Philip Jones (London, 1990), 69-80.
60. Continuous litigation might be imagined as a form of resistance. According to James C. Scott, the transcript of a litigation was not as "hidden" as it might have been in other forms of resistance practiced in situations of extreme domination, but the public transcript of court cases hid the actual political issues behind the litigation to some degree (Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance [New Haven, 1985];
61. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts [New Haven, 1990]).
62. On continuous litigation, see Muir, "Was There Republicanism in the Renaissance Republics? Venice after Agnadello," in John Martin and Dennis Romano (eds.), Venice Reconsidered: Venetian History and Civilization, 1297-1797 (Baltimore, 1999).
63. For parallel examples of the salutary social consequences of continuous litigation in other cultures, see David T. Konig, Law and Society in Puritan Massachusetts: Essex County, 1629-1692 (Chapel Hill, 1979);
64. Melissa Macauley, Litigation Masters in Late Imperial China: Social Empowerment and Chinese Legal Culture, 1723-1919 (Stanford, 1998).
65. The leader of this move toward regional history has been Chittolini, La formazione dello Stato regionale e le istituzioni del contado (Turin, 1979);
66. Chittolini, idem, "Stati padani, 'Stati del Rinascimento': Problemi di ricerca," in Giovanni Tocci (ed.), Persistenze feudali e autonomie communitative in stati padani fra Cinque e Seicento (Bologna, 1988), 9-29;
67. Chittolini, idem, "The 'Private,' the 'Public,' the State," Journal of Modern History, LXVII, supplement about "The Origins of the State in Italy, 1300-1600" (1995), S34-61.
68. This last article provides the best introduction to the historical research about the regional states in the late medieval and early modern periods. It has been separately published in Julius Kirshner (ed.), The Origins of the State in Italy, 1300-1600 (Chicago, 1996), 34-61.
69. Paolo Prodi, brother of the recent prime minister of Italy, is one of the most influential regional historians: See Prodi (trans. Susan Haskins), The Papal Prince: One Body and Two Souls: The Papal Monarchy in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1987);
70. Prodi, Idem, Il sacramento del potere: Il giuramento politico nella storia costituzionale dell'Occidente (Bologna, 1992).
71. On the inapplicability of Weber's model of the modern state, see Kirshner, "Introduction: The State is 'Back In,'" Journal of Modern History, LXVII, supplement about "The Origins of the State in Italy, 1300-1600" (1995), S1-2.
72. On the Venetian territorial state, see Marino Berengo, La società veneta alla fine del Settecento: Ricerche storiche (Florence, 1956);
73. for the concept of "diarchy," Angelo Ventura, Nobilità e popolo nella società veneta del Quattrocento e Cinquecento (Milan, 1993; 2d ed.);
74. on cultural differences throughout the terraferma, Gaetano Cozzi, "Ambiente veneziano, ambiente veneto," in Stefano Rosso-Mazzinghi (ed.), L'uomo e il suo ambiente (Florence, 1973), 93-146;
75. Gaetano Cozzi, idem, "Considerazioni sull'amministrazione della giustizia nella Repubblica di Venezia (secc. XV-XVI)," in Sergio Bertelli, Nicolai Rubinstein, and Craig Hugh Smyth (eds.), Florence and Venice: Comparisons and Relations, I. Quattrocento (Florence, 1979), 101-133;
76. idem (ed.), Stato, società e giustizia nella Repubblica Veneta (sec. XV-XVIII) (Rome, 1980, 1985), 2v.;
77. idem, "Politica, società, istituzioni," in idem and Michael Knapton (eds.), La Repubblica di Venezia nell'età moderna (Turin, 1986), 3-252;
78. Muir, Mad Blood Stirring: Vendetta and Factions in Friuli during the Renaissance (Baltimore, 1993), 49-67;
79. Furio Bianco, 1511: La "Crudel Zobia Grassa": Rivolte contadine e faide nobiliari in Friuli tra '400 e '500 (Pordenone, 1995);
80. Marco Bellabarba, La giustizia ai confini: Il principato vescovile di Trento agli inizi dell'età moderna (Bologna, 1966).
81. See also the excellent synthesis of work on the Veneto, Alfredo Viggiano, Governanti e governati: Legittimità del potere ed esercizio dell'autorità sovrana nello Stato veneto della prima età moderna (Treviso, 1993).
82. On "indirect government" in the Genoese state, see Osvaldo Raggio, Faide e parentele: Lo stato genovese visto dalla Fontanabuona (Turin, 1990), xiv.
83. Cf. Maurice Aymard, "La transizione dal feudalismo al capitalismo," in Storia d'Italia. Annali. I. Dal feudalismo al capitalismo (Turin, 1978), 1131-1192.
84. One comparative historian of Mediterranean empires has described the Genoese empire in terms of the "'absence' of the state": Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Before Columbus: Exploration and Colonization from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1229-1492 (Philadelphia, 1987), 96-120. The best synthetic study of the Genoese state is Epstein, Genoa & the Genoese.
85. This view of Venetian legal administration derives from the work of Cozzi and his students in Stato, società, e giustizia nella Republica Veneta, summarized in Viggiano, Governanti e governati. On corruption among Venetian governors and judges, see Queller, Venetian Patriciate.
86. See Muir, Mad Blood Stirring, for an analysis of the most prominent case of politics pursued through informal factions.
87. For an argument that clientalism and feuding should not be viewed as antimodern but as ways of consolidating states during the early modern period, see Chittolini, "The 'Private,' the 'Public,' the State."
88. On patronage and corruption in Florence, see Andrea Zorzi, "The Florentines and Their Public Offices in the Early Fifteenth Century: Competition, Abuses of Power, and Unlawful Acts," in Muir and Ruggiero (eds.), History from Crime (Baltimore, 1994), 110-134;
89. Jean Claude Waquet (trans. Linda McCall), Corruption: Ethics and Power in Florence, 1600-1770 (University Park, 1992).
90. The legal status of cittadino was available to provincials and commoners of substantial property who were resident in Venice, but it granted only trading privileges, access to technical and clerical jobs in Venetian government, and the opportunity to join certain charitable institutions, such as the Scuole Grandi. It did not carry any political privileges. Cf. Pullan, Rich and Poor. Little is known about the cittadini as a class, but James Grubb is currently working on a comprehensive study. Before the seventeenth century, only a small number of provincials received membership in the patriciate, usually because of military services.
91. On the suicidal reluctance of the Venetian patriciate to recruit new members, see James C. Davis, The Decline of the Venetian Nobility as a Ruling Class (Baltimore, 1962);
92. Volker Hunecke, Der venezianische Adel am ende der Republik, 1646-1797 (Tübingen, 1995).
93. On the structural history of the Italian states, see Federico Chabod, Scritti sul Rinascimento (Turin, 1981);
94. Federico Chabod, idem, Lo Stato e la vita religiosa a Milano nell'epoca di Carlo V (Turin, 1977).
95. On the Tuscan grand ducal state, see Elena Fasano Guarini (ed.), Potere e società negli Stati regionali italiani del '500 e '600 (Bologna, 1978);
96. idem, "Center and Periphery," Journal of Modern History, LXVII, supplement about "The Origins of the State in Italy, 1300-1600" (1995), S74-96.
97. Burke, The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy: Essays en Perception and Communication (Cambridge, 1987), on the importance of literate culture, 130, on notary statistics, 128.
98. For an account of the career of a notary who specialized in peasant clients in the Padovano, see Berengo, "Africo Clementi, agronomo padovano del Cinquecento," in Miscellanea Augusto Campana (Padua, 1981), I, 27-69.
99. An illiterate Sienese peasant in the fifteenth century found writing so alluring that he had various people keep a diary for him: Duccio Balestracci, La zappa e la retorica: Memoire familiari di un contadino toscano del Quattrocento (Florence, 1984);
100. English version (trans. Paolo Squatriti and Betsy Merideth), The Renaissance in the Fields: Family Memoirs of a Fifteenth-Century Tuscan Peasant (University Park, 1999).
101. Since the medieval statutes have long played a crucial role in forming communal identities, they have received a great deal of attention by local historians, and many of them are published. For a list of the published statutes for Friuli alone, see Gaetano Perusini, "Gli statuti di una vicinia rurale Friulana del Cinquecento," Memorie storico forogiuliesi, XIIIL (1958-1959), 213n.
102. A recent example is the superb critical study and edition of the statutes of Rovereto in the Trentino: Federica Parcianello (ed.), Statuti di Rovereto del 1425 (Venice, 1991).
103. On the role of statutes in communal life, see Chittolini and Dietmar Willoweit, Statuti, città, territori in Italia e Germania tra medioevo ed età moderna (Bologna, 1991);
104. Chittolini and Dietmar Willoweit, idem, L'organizzazione del territono in Italia e Germania: Secoli XIII-XIV (Bologna, 1994).
105. On notarial practice in general, see Claudio Povolo, "Aspetti e problemi dell'amministrazione della giustizia penale nella repubblica di Venezia, secoli XVI-XVII," in Cozzi (ed.), Stato, società e giustizia nella Repubblica Veneta (sec. XV-XVIII), I, 153-258.
106. Muir, "Was There Republicanism?"
107. For the contrasting German model that connected communal ideology and Protestant leadership during the German revolts of 1525, see Peter Blickle (trans. Thomas A. Brady and H. C. Erik Midelfort), The Revolution of 1525: The German Peasants' War from a New Perspective (Baltimore, 1981);
108. Peter Blickle idem (trans. Thomas Dunlap), Communal Reformation: The Quest for Salvation in Sixteenth-Century Germany (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1992).
109. For the radical millenarian phase led by Michael Gaismair, which spilled over into the northern Veneto, see Giorgio Politi, Gli statuti impossibili: La rivoluzione tirolese del 1525 e il "programma" di Michael Gaismair (Turin, 1995).
110. Machiavelli, Discourses, 1.4. Quotation from Machiavelli: The Chief Works and Others, II, 203.
111. Povolo, L'intrigo dell'Onore: Poteri e istituzioni nella Repubblica di Venezia tra Cinque e Seicento (Verona, 1997).
112. Cf. Dean and K.J.P. Lowe (eds.), Crime, Society and the Law in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge, 1994).
113. On Venice, see James C. Davis, Decline of the Venetian Nobility.
114. On Florence, see Anthony Molho, Marriage Alliance in Late Medieval Florence (Cambridge, Mass., 1994).
115. Elias, History of Manners;
116. Elias, idem, The Court Society (New York, 1983).
117. Burke, Fortunes of the Courtier.
118. Alvise Cornaro, Discorsi intomo alla vita sobria, in Giuseppe Fiocco, Alvise Cornaro: Il suo tempo e le sue opere (Vicenza, 1965), 171-190;
119. Mario Savorgnano, Del governo della sua famiglia: Lettera a Luigi Cornaro (Udine, 1862), 10.
120. Savorgnano, Del governo, 12-13.
121. On restricted marriage, see the useful discussion of the Venetian practice in James C. Davis, A Venetian Family and Its Fortune, 1500-1900: The Donà and the Conservation of Their Wealth (Philadelphia, 1975), 93-112.
122. Ernesto Degani, I partiti in Friuli nel 1500 e la storia di un famoso duello (Udine, 1900), 79-116.
123. On the murder of Antonio Savorgnan in 1552 and a mass attack on the Savorgnan family in 1561, see Archivio di Stato, Venice, Consiglio dei Dieci, Parti criminali, reg. 8, fols. 50, 60, 67v, 148v-150, 236; reg. 9, fols. 62v-64v.
124. For the murder of Francesco Savorgnan in 1560, see Soldoniero di Strassoldo (ed. Degani), Cronaca dal 1509 al 1603 (Udine, 1895), 48.
125. Erasmus is quoted in Elias, History of Manners, 78-79.
126. On the new courtesy as a form of communication theory, see Muir, "The Double Binds of Manly Revenge in Renaissance Italy," in Richard C. Trexler (ed.), Gender Rhetorics: Postures of Dominance and Submission in History (Binghamton, 1994), 65-82.
127. Giovanna Della Casa (trans. Konrad Eisenbichler and Kenneth R. Bartlett), Galateo (Toronto, 1986), xi-xiii, xxi-xxii, 10-11, 19-24.
128. On the success of Galateo, see Elias, History of Manners, 81-82.
129. On the new formalities, see Burke, Historical Anthropology, 90-92;
130. Frederic Robertson Bryson, The Point of Honor in Sixteenth-Century Italy: An Aspect of the Life of the Gentleman (New York, 1935), 15-17.
131. On the spread of courtesies in France, see Orest Ranum, "Courtesy, Absolutism, and the Rise of the French State, 1630-1660," Journal of Modern History, LII (1980), 426-451.
132. On the theme of honest dissimulation, see Perez Zagorin, Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution, and Conformity in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 1990);
133. Pietro Redondi (trans. Raymond Rosenthal), Galileo Heretic (Princeton, 1987), 24.
134. Cf. the rather different approach in Martin, "Inventing Sincerity, Refashioning Prudence: The Discovery of the Individual in Renaissance Europe," American Historical Review, CII (1997), 1309-1342.
135. For the Mocenigo quotation, see Archivio di Stato, Venice, Consiglio dei Dieci, Parti comuni, register for 1567-68, fol. 110.
136. On amnesia about massacres during the Triestine civil war, see Chris Hedges, "In Trieste, Investigation of Brutal Era Is Blocked," New York Times, 20 Apr. 1997.