Deceit and sincerity in early modern Venice

Eighteenth-Century Studies

Volumn 38, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 399-415

  Johnson, James H ^a  

^a BOSTON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 61249490329     PISSN: 00132586     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/ecs.2005.0027     Document Type: Article

References (54)

1. The definitive article on the Esecutori contro la Bestemmia is Renzo Derosas, "Moralità e giustizia a Venezia nell '500-'600: Gli Esecutori contro la Bestemmia," in Gaetano Cozzi, ed., Stato, società e giustizia nella repubblica Veneta (sec. XV-XVIII) (Rome: Jouvence, 1980), 431-528.
2. Gaetano Cozzi, La società veneta e il suo diritto. Saggi su questioni matrimoniali, giustizia penale, politica del diritto, sopravvivenza del diritto veneto nell'Ottocento (Venice: Marsilio, 2000), 66, 80.
3. Derosas, "Moralità e giustizia a Venezia nell '500-'600," 446-8.
4. Cozzi, La società veneta e il suo diritto, 71, 83.
5. For a comprehensive treatment of an important element of the Sant' Ufficio's business, the monitoring of relations between Jews and non-Jews in Venice, see Brian Pullan, The Jews of Europe and the Inquisition of Venice, 1550-1670 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983).
6. Derosas, "Moralità e giustizia a Venezia nell '500-'600," 455.
7. See Brendon Dooley and Sabina A. Baron, eds., The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe (London and New York: Routledge, 2001)
8. especially Mario Infelise, "The war, the news and the curious," 216-6.
9. See also Brendon Dooley, The Social History of Skepticism. Experience and Doubt in Early-Modern Culture (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1999), esp. 61-8.
10. Dooley discusses the relationship between printed newsletters and public opinion in "News and doubt in early modern culture," in Dooley and Baron, eds., 275-90.
11. G. Bistort, Il magistrato alle pompe nella Repubblica di Venezia (Venice: Tipografia-Libreria Emiliana, 1912).
12. J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment. Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1975), 324.
13. Vettor Sandi, Principi di Storia civile della Repubblica di Venezia, 3 vols. (Venice: Presso Sebastian Coletti, 1772), 1:351.
14. Rosita Levi Pisetzky, Storia del costume in Italia, 4 vols. (Milan: Istituto Editoriale Italiano, 1967), 3:271, 425-67; 4:342-3.
15. For a more general discussion of sumptuary laws in Renaissance Italy, see Diane Owen Hughes, "Distinguishing Signs: Ear-Rings, Jews and Franciscan Rhetoric in the Italian Renaissance City," Past and Present, 112 (1986):3-54.
16. See, inter alia, Gaetano Cozzi, Michael Knapton, and Giovanni Scarabello, La Repubblica di Venezia nell'età moderna, 2 vols. (Turin: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, 1992), 2:168-200.
17. Volker Hunecke, "Il Corpo aristocratico," in L'Ultima fuse della Serenissima, Piero del Negro and Paolo Preto, eds., in Storia di Venezia dalle origini alla caduta della Serenissima, 12 vols. (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italians, 1998), 8:359-425.
18. See also Hunecke, Il patriziato veneziano alla fine della Repubblica. 1646-1797, Demografia, famiglia, ménage (Rome: Jouvence, 1997).
19. Provveditori alle Pompe, B. 1, Cap. II, 58v, A. S. V.
20. Ballarinus pater, Maggior Consiglio, 1688, A. S. V.
21. Provveditori alle Pompe, B. 2, Cap. IV, A. S. V.
22. The decree was promulgated 18 May 1707. Provedditori alle Pompe, B. 2, Cap. IV, 151v;
23. see also Bistort, Il magistrato alle pompe, 98, 142-3.
24. [Joseph Jérôme] de Lalande, Voyage en Italie, 9 vols. (Paris: Chez La Veuve Desaint, 1786), 8:507.
25. For detailed accounts of noble masking and related legislation, see Maximilien Misson, Nouveau voyage d'Italie, avec un Mémoire contenant des avis utiles à ceux qui voudront faire le même voyage (1731),
26. quoted in Emanuele Kanceff, ed., Voyageurs Etrangères à /Foreign Travellers in / Viaggiatori stranieri a Venezia, vol. 9 of Biblioteca del viaggio in Italia I Bibliotbèque du voyage en Italie, Studi / Etudes (Geneva: Slatkine, 1981), 136-7;
27. Giambattista Albrizzi, Forestiero illuminato intorno le cose più rare, e curiose antiche, emoderne, della città di Venezia (Venice: n. p.,1772), 411-23;
28. Giovanni Comisso, Agenti segreti di Venezia, 1705-1797 (Milan: Longanesi & Co., 1941), 423-4.
29. Pietro Garzoni, Paragone usato da Pietro Garzoni, Senatore sù la Repubblica di Venezia per fare prouvata della sua qualità, 221. Ms. 1727, Biblioteca della Fondazione Querini-Stampalia, Venice.
30. G. Rossi, Leggie Costumi Veneziani, 416 volumes, [n. d.], ms. Biblioteca Marciana, 7:235.
31. [Carlo Contarini], Istoria delle questiani promosse da un eccitamento del N. V. S. Carlo Contarini con le arringhe tutte fatte nel Maggior Consiglio l'anno 1780, 3 vols. (Venice: Pietro Sola, 1797), 1:26.
32. Giacomo Nani', Principi di una amministrazione ordinata e tranquilla [n.d.], 78, Biblioteca Civica di Padova.
33. Here are the reports from August 11, 1747: "Il N. H. Marco Antonio Corner, Michaele, quest oggi circa le ore 21 si trariene sotto alle Procuratie Vechie, vestito in Velada di setta, amarizo, collor violetto, perucha grissia, in sachetto. Il N. H. Agostino Nani di Canaregio, alle ore 22 in circa, si tratiene in Piazza di S. Marco, a discorere ne Buossoli di questi nuovelisti delle Guere, vestito con la sua solita velada di Gameloto Collor Canella, Perucha alla Mirliton. Il N. H. Domenico Guerini, Giulio, alle ore 21 e meza, sotto alle Procuratie Vechie, si tratiene vestito in tabàro, collor cenerino, Perucha bionda, in Sachetto" (A. S. V., Inquisitori di Stato, B. 595).
34. Bistort, Il magistrato alle pompe nella Repubblica di Venezia, 159.
35. Pietro Garzoni, Paragone usato da Pietro Garzoni, 228.
36. See also Jonathan Walker, "Gambling and Venetian Noblemen, c. 1500-1700," Past and Present, 162 (1999): 28-69.
37. Quoted in Alexandre Stroev, Les Aventuriers des lumières (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997), 196.
38. See Andrea Degrandi, "Problemi di percezione e di rappresentazione del gioco d'azzardo," in Gherardo Ortalli, ed., Gioco e giustizia nell'Italia di Commune (Rome: Viella, 1993), 111.
39. Walker, "Gambling and Venetian Noblemen, c. 1500-1700," 56.
40. The law was issued in 1704. See Giovanni Dolcetti, Le bische e il guioco d'azzardo à Venezia 1172-1807 (Venice: Aldo Manuzio, 1903), 73.
41. Edward Wright, Some Observations Made in Travelling Through France, Italy, &c in the Years 1720, 1721, and 1722, 2 vols. (London: Tho. Ward and E. Wicksteed, 1730), 1:87.
42. See Hunecke, Il patriziato veneziano alla fine della Repubblica, esp. 167ff.
43. This point bears a certain resemblance to what Stephen Greenblatt has identified in poems, plays, and religious tracts from the sixteenth century. In his classic book Renaissance Self-Fashioning Greenblatt describes an emergent view of identity as "a manipulable, artful process." Self-fashioning, he argues, was rooted in the conviction that the self might be shaped contrary to expected social or political roles. See Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980), 1.
44. Quoted in Leon Guilhamet, The Sincere Ideal. Studies on Sincerity in Eighteenth-Century English Literature (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1974), 15-6.
45. John Martin singles out devotional works of reformers in particular as key in the construction of sincerity and the emergence of a new self-consciousness in his excellent article "Inventing Sincerity, Refashioning Prudence: The Discovery of the Individual in Renaissance Europe," American Historical Review, 102.5 (1997): 1309-42.
46. Of the emergent view of interior agency, Martin writes: "This is not to say that what contemporaries imagined as the inner self was, as we are often inclined to believe, 'truer' than the ways one chose to represent it, either in the city or the court. Rather, the new sense of the self views the human being as agent, subject, or author - as someone responsible for his or her actions and assertions" (1334).
47. Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1972), 2.
48. Baltasar Gracián, The Art of Worldly Wisdom. A Pocket Oracle, trans. Christopher Mauer (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 124.
49. The Neapolitan Torcetto Accetto published Della dissimulazione onesta in 1641 to remedy what he believed was a growing gap between social reality and what the custodians of truth claimed. Dissembling armed the powerless against the powerful and gave the mighty courtly codes of behavior that smoothed rough relations. "Dress may be changed occasionally to suit the reason of fortune, with the intention not of doing but rather of avoiding harm; and this is the only reason to tolerate dissembling, which is thereby not a fraud." See Dooley, The Social History of Skepticism, 124-8.
50. For other early modern "doctrines of legitimized dissimulation" - among religious dissenters, nonconformist philosophers, and libertines - see Perez Zagorin, Ways of Lying. Dissimulation, Persecution, and Conformity in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1990).
51. Elements of what we might recognize as the modern individual appear in the micro-histories of Davis at different times, in different ways, and in different contexts. The effect is to qualify, complicate, and enrich any simple notion that the early modern period witnessed, to invoke Jacob Burckhardt's resonant phrase, the birth of the individual. Arnaud du Tilh, the false Martin Guerre, sought "to forge a new identity and a new life for himself" by mastering the intimate details of the real Martin's daily life against a backdrop of rigidly maintained and, as suspicions grew, closely monitored boundaries of behavior. In Fiction in the Archives, Davis looks to judicial customs and conventions as boundaries of a different sort as subjects devised legal defenses against their accusers. Working from within these conventional narrative structures, the accused fashioned accounts of their own identities, Davis argues, that brought coherence and revealed a degree of individuality. See Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1983);
52. Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1987).
53. Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1975), xvii.
54. Rossi, Leggie Costumi Veneziani, 12:34-5.