Venice's Intimate Empire

Venice's Intimate Empire

Author: Erin Maglaque

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-06-15

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 1501721666

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Mining private writings and humanist texts, Erin Maglaque explores the lives and careers of two Venetian noblemen, Giovanni Bembo and Pietro Coppo, who were appointed as colonial administrators and governors. In Venice’s Intimate Empire, she uses these two men and their families to showcase the relationship between humanism, empire, and family in the Venetian Mediterranean. Maglaque elaborates an intellectual history of Venice’s Mediterranean empire by examining how Venetian humanist education related to the task of governing. Taking that relationship as her cue, Maglaque unearths an intimate view of the emotions and subjectivities of imperial governors. In their writings, it was the affective relationships between husbands and wives, parents and children, humanist teachers and their students that were the crucible for self-definition and political decision making. Venice’s Intimate Empire thus illuminates the experience of imperial governance by drawing connections between humanist education and family affairs. From marriage and reproduction to childhood and adolescence, we see how intimate life was central to the Bembo and Coppo families’ experience of empire. Maglaque skillfully argues that it was within the intimate family that Venetians’ relationships to empire—its politics, its shifting social structures, its metropolitan and colonial cultures—were determined.


Glassmaking in Renaissance Venice

Glassmaking in Renaissance Venice

Author: W. Patrick McCray

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-03-02

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 1351933612

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The transformation of the Venetian glass industry during the Renaissance was not only a technical phenomenon, but also a social one. In this volume, Patrick McCray examines the demand, production and distribution of glass and glassmaking technology during this period and evaluates several key topics, including the nature of Renaissance demand for certain luxury goods, the interaction between industry and government in the Renaissance, and technological change as a social process. McCray places in its broader economic and cultural context a craft and industry that has been traditionally viewed primarily through the surviving artefacts held in museum collections. McCray explores the social and economic context of glassmaking in Venice, from the guild and state level down to the workings of the individual glass house. He tracks the dissemination of Venetian-style glassmaking throughout Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and its effects on Venice’s glass industry. Integrating evidence from a wide variety of sources - written documents such as shop records and recipe books, pictorial representations of glass and glassmaking, and the careful physical and chemical analysis of glass pieces that have survived to the present - he examines the relation between consumer demand and technological change. In the process, he traces the organizational changes that signified a transition from an older and more traditional manner of ’artisan’ manufacture to a modern, ’factory-style’ manner of production.


Transnationalism in Ancient and Medieval Societies

Transnationalism in Ancient and Medieval Societies

Author: Michael C. Howard

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2014-01-10

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 0786490330

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While scholars have long documented the migration of people in ancient and medieval times, they have paid less attention to those who traveled across borders with some regularity. This study of early transnational relations explores the routine interaction of people across the boundaries of empires, tribal confederacies, kingdoms, and city-states, paying particular attention to the role of long-distance trade along the Silk Road and maritime trade routes. It examines the obstacles voyagers faced, including limited travel and communication capabilities, relatively poor geographical knowledge, and the dangers of a fragmented and shifting political landscape, and offers profiles of better-known transnational elites such as the Hellenic scholar Herodotus and the Venetian merchant Marco Polo, as well lesser known servants, merchants, and sailors. By revealing the important political, economic, and cultural role cross-border trade and travel played in ancient society, this work demonstrates that transnationalism is not unique to modern times. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.


Exploring Cultural History

Exploring Cultural History

Author: Melissa Calaresu

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-12-05

Total Pages: 543

ISBN-13: 1351937634

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Over the past 30 years, cultural history has moved from the periphery to the centre of historical studies, profoundly influencing the way we look at and analyze all aspects of the past. In this volume, a distinguished group of international historians has come together to consider the rise of cultural history in general, and to highlight the particular role played in this rise by Peter Burke, the first professor of Cultural History at the University of Cambridge and one of the most prolific and influential authors in the field. Reflecting the many and varied interests of Peter Burke, the essays in this volume cover a broad range of topics, geographies and chronologies. Grouped into four sections, 'Historical Anthropology', 'Politics and Communication', 'Images' and 'Cultural Encounters', the collection explores the boundaries and possibilities of cultural history; each essay presenting an opportunity to engage with the wider issues of the methods and problems of cultural history, and with Peter Burke's contributions to each chosen theme. Taken as a whole the collection shows how cultural history has enriched the ways in which we understand the traditional fields of political, economic, literary and military history, and permeates much of what we now understand as social history. It also demonstrates how cultural history is now at the heart of the coming together of traditional disciplines, providing a meeting ground for a variety of interests and methodologies. Offering a wide international perspective, this volume complements another Ashgate publication, Popular Culture in Early Modern England, which focuses on Peter Burke's influence on the study of popular culture in English history.


Mediaeval Greece

Mediaeval Greece

Author: Nicolas Cheetham

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 1981-01-01

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 9780300105391

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The history of Greece between the collapse of the Roman Empire and the birth of the modern Greek state is for most people an historical blank. Specialist studies are not lacking, but unlike the other Mediterranean lands that have been the subject of many recent books, there has been no general history of mediaeval Greece published in English since 1908. This book is an attempt to fill the gap. The history of Greece in this period offers a long series of human dramas played out among clashes and contrasts between races, cultures, and religions; between Greeks and Slavs; between Frenchmen, Italians, Catalans, and Turks; between the Orthodox, the Catholic, and the Moslem faiths; between the old order and audacious intruders. Western knights jousted among the ruins of antiquity, and Venetian and Turkish galleys fought each other throughout the Aegean. After an introductory account of the Dark Age invasions of Goths and Slavs and of the survival and reestablishment of the Greek identity under Byzantine rule, Nicolas Cheetham discusses the Frankish domination of Greece after the Fourth Crusade (1204) when Frenchmen and Italians divided Greece between them and set up rival feudal dynasties. The book describes how princes from Champagne, dukes from Burgundy, Catalan adventurers, and Florentine bankers ruled in the Peloponnese and at Athens, and how the Greeks led by Palaeologus and Cantacuzeno from Byzantium reconquered the country, only to lose it again to the Turks. This book illuminates a long but hitherto little known period in the history of one of Europe's most intensively studied countries.


Piazza San Marco

Piazza San Marco

Author: Iain Fenlon

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2012-06-01

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0674063554

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The Piazza San Marco, one of the most famous and instantly recognizable townscapes in the West, if not the world, has been described as a stage set, as Europe’s drawing room, as a painter’s canvas. This book traces the changing shape and function of the piazza, from its beginnings in the ninth century to its present day ubiquity in the Venetian, European, as well as global imagination. Through its long history, the Piazza San Marco has functioned as civic space that was used for such varied activities as public meetings; animal-baiting; executions; state processions; meat and produce markets; a performance venue for rock concerts; as well as, more recently, a cafe to enjoy a leisurely Campari. Constantly alert to the question of function, this book recreates not only rituals of the past but also activities of the present, from the coronation of the doge to the legendary Pink Floyd concert of 1989, with much fanfare in between. Iain Fenlon recreates the dynamic, colorful, and noisy history of the piazza—a history that is also the history of Venice and, indeed, of Europe.


Venice, Cità Excelentissima

Venice, Cità Excelentissima

Author: Marino Sanudo

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2008-06-30

Total Pages: 641

ISBN-13: 0801887658

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When Venice was both a center of Renaissance culture and a gathering place for news from around the world, Marin Sanudo tried to write everything down. He was the finest diarist of his time, with a keen eye for the everyday and the monumental alike. Venice, Cità Excelentissima offers a broad and engaging introduction to Sanudo's detailed observations of life in his beloved city and the world it knew. This expertly translated volume glimpses into Renaissance life at a spectacular time when Venice was at the top of its game. Organized thematically, the selections offer a Venetian's viewpoint of the glories of high culture, the gritty reality and sparkling drama of daily life, the perils of diplomacy and war, and the high-risk ventures of voyages and commerce. Here, the work of the Renaissance's most assiduous historian is finally given the accessibility it warrants and the merit it is due.


Humanism, Venice, and Women

Humanism, Venice, and Women

Author: Margaret L. King

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-05-31

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 1000949648

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Originally published between 1975 and 2003, the essays included in Humanism, Venice, and Women reflect Margaret L. King's distinct but interlocking scholarly interests: humanism and Venice; women and humanism; and women of the Italian Renaissance. The first part focuses on defining the key characteristics of Venetian as opposed to other Italian humanisms, with an analysis of Gramscian theory about the historical role of intellectuals as an aid to understanding humanism in Venice, followed by essays on three Venetian humanists who wrote about family relationships (or the need to avoid them). The third section introduces the major Renaissance women humanists and analyzes the relation of their work to that of male humanists, along with an essay on Renaissance mothers of sons, in Italy and beyond. Crossing boundaries of region and gender, and the subdisciplines of intellectual and social history, these essays are provocative in themselves while demonstrating how shifting historiographical contexts encourage scholars to view the historical record in new and fruitful ways.


Oceans, Seas, Shorelines and Warfare

Oceans, Seas, Shorelines and Warfare

Author: Richard Harding

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-09-23

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1040147909

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For as long as humanity has ventured on the seas, naval warfare has been an integral part of their activities and the focal point for many histories and ideas of heritage. This book presents a rarely explored aspect: the long‐term impact of those battles on shorelines, seas and oceans. Dramatic and altering, the physical scars of battles remain with us today in the form of cultural landscapes and archaeological sites, while the geopolitical consequences of warfare have been world‐changing. The migrations of peoples across the seas, accompanied by violence, have done more to shape the demographic and cultural map of the modern world than almost anything else. Both seaborne opportunities and threats have influenced the way of life of coastal communities. Today, technology has seen these threats extend far into the deepest ocean and reach across continents. This book shows how, despite being virtually invisible to an increasing percentage of the world’s population, the ocean is more significant now than it has ever been. Ranging from the world of antiquity to the present day with a global perspective, the volume is intended to appeal to those interested in history, archaeology, social sciences and the environment.